As September comes to a close, I feel like I have worn out my sneakers.
After a slower paced summer, this past month has seemed like a fast sprint.
I am not only teaching four classes, conducting several corporate trainings, and managing my coaching clients each week, but it seems like I am getting deluged with requests for meetings, Zoom calls, etc. which is eating up all of my “free” time.
As much as I try to organize my days, I feel like I am just jumping hurdles in order to get to the finish line before it is too late into the night. Then it starts all over the next day.
Many leaders do have staff to help them but giving up control, including decision making, makes them hesitant to hand over the baton.
In the book, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey discusses “sharpening the saw” which leaders could benefit from.
The concept means that if you take x minutes to sharpen the saw, the tree will be cut down faster versus taking longer with a dull saw.
Instead of doing this, I hear from leaders all the time that “it is quicker if I do it myself”. If they tracked their time, they would log a lot more hours with that dull saw than if they realized they can’t win the race every day effectively.
More importantly, by constantly sprinting all the time these leaders cannot fully give their attention to everything effectively.
Greg McKeown states in his book, Essentialism – The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, that we have “lost our ability to filter what is important and what isn’t”. He goes on to say that it is not just how many choices we have which has increased over time but also the number of “outside influencers” who provide their opinions on these choices.
In other words, “it is not just information overload; it is opinion overload.”
Leaders need to determine which options of their precious time they want to pursue.
An easy way to do this is by creating a Mind Map. 
This tool is defined as “a diagram used to visually organize information into a hierarchy, showing relationships among pieces of the whole. It is often based on a single concept, drawn as an image in the center of a blank page, to which associated representations of ideas such as images, words and parts of words are added.”
I would instead suggest doing this slightly differently by putting you in the middle of the image.
Treat your life as a project with the starting branches being the key areas in your life. As you start to define the smaller branches stemming off the larger ones, you may realize some are not as important as they seem or ones that were significant in the past no longer are.
Are you afraid to break off some of these branches because they are comfortable to you and/or you are fearful of the repercussions if you saw them off?
As you ponder each branch, ask yourself “do they bring me joy?”, “do they fulfill me?”, and/or “do they help me to achieve my greatest dreams?”
Instead of buying another pair of running shoes, consider if you really want your life to continue to be a race.
Or would you prefer it to be a leisurely stroll where you can really embrace the important things in your life?