Schedule a Personal Inventory Day Each Month
As important as setting New Year’s plans is figuring out how we achieve them and not getting bogged down in work so much that we forget to take care of ourselves. On the Call Your Girlfriend podcast, hosted by journalist Anne Friedman and Aminatu Sow, co-founder of Tech Lady Mafia, human rights technologist Sabrina Hersey Issa advises scheduling a Personal Inventory Day each month to take stock of your time regularly. going.
Hersey Issa is the CEO of digital agency Be Bold Media and venture partner at Jump Canon, a venture capital firm for “unconventional, underrepresented and impressive founders,” so she knows a little about how to get things done. (Sow calls her “the most competent person ever. saw “). In her podcast, she emphasizes the importance of taking time to think about where our time goes and where we want it – not just at the beginning of the year or on our birthday, but every month. Personal Inventory Days are a deliberate analysis of how you want to manage your life, what your priorities are, and how you get to them.
“Everything I feel, what I need to do to make my life stressful, I do on this day,” she says. “Assess what you want for yourself, be really honest with yourself, with yourself and with no one else. Without an apology, focus on your needs and write them down. Write down your goals, make a plan, and then put it somewhere close at hand so you can easily refer to it and refer to it in the future. “
Here’s what she recommends:
- Each month, set aside a day on your calendar (she picks her birthday, the 16th) with a recurring event called Personal Inventory Day.
- Use that day to complete the tasks you need to get done to be successful. This could mean checking your credit score, looking at your savings goals and budget, making an appointment with your doctor, or keeping track of your other decisions.
- Ask yourself: What have I learned this month? What surprised me and why? What am I grateful for? To whom am I grateful? (Hersey Issa then sends short thank-you notes to the people she is grateful to.)
- Add the tasks you want to solve with your PID to Evernote or Google Doc (or an old-fashioned pen and paper list) every month so you don’t forget anything important.
- At the end of the year or on your birthday, review the data you’ve collected using your PIDs. What have you worked on for yourself? For what and to whom are you grateful? What are you studying and what are you interested in? “See where there is a gap between where you are now and where you want to be, and use that as an indicator of where you need to work,” she says.
Ultimately PID is about ensuring you are on the path you want to be and being deliberate with your time.
Hersey Issa says it’s a reminder that “I set my own priorities, I rule my life. If your dreams are important to you, don’t neglect them by cramming them into arbitrary New Year’s promises or birthday deadlines. ”
It also lowered her stress levels and freed up the brain space that was previously occupied by anxiety and doubt.
“You control your life, you set your priorities and you are successful,” she says.