To figure out your mission, you need to know what really matters to you. Whenever you take on a project, ask yourself, “Is this going to bring me closer to accomplish my mission?” When things get bad and you start to think about quitting, remembering how whatever you’re working on advances your mission will help give you the determination you need to get the job done. It doesn’t have to be fancy or esoteric – this is your life we’re talking about! In plain language, what are you here for? What is it that, looking back from your rocking chair on the porch, in between hurling abuse at neighborhood kids whose danged ball keeps landing in your hedges, what is it that will make you feel you’ve lived a life worth living?Ī mission makes a useful mantra, a little ditty to look in the mirror Stuart Smalley-style and chant to yourself when things are looking bleak, but it’s also a test,a yardstick against which to measure your actions. 28th level half-elf war mages have missions, usually something about rescuing the Night Queen from the clutches of the evil Tralfamadora and rebuilding the broken spires of the Moon Palace. Superheroes have missions, some naive nonsense about truth, justice, and the be-leotarded way. Corporations have missions, usually some BS gobbledigook about “synergizing this” and “maximizing that”. It seems odd to most people to have a mission. The 50,000-feet view is where you focus on, in a word, your mission. ⌄ Scroll down to continue reading article ⌄ Your Mission, Should You Choose to Accept It Where are you headed, and what will your life look like when you get there? Is it too late to change your itinerary and take a different connecting flight, to destinations un-thought-of before now? And when are they coming around with the peanuts, anyway? (OK, maybe that’s taking the metaphor too far…) This is what Allen calls “the 50,000-feet view”, where next actions and contexts drop away and instead you can think about the meaning of it all – what gives your life purpose. From cruising altitude, the hubbub on the ground is invisible, and you can relax, get comfortable, and watch the world roll along under the plane. ![]() Individual buildings fall away as the plane climbs higher and higher, until the city itself blurs into a part of the landscape. As you look out the window, the jumble of buildings, trees, and roads resolves itself into a grid of streets and city blocks. Once the plane takes off, though, things calm down. When the plane’s on the runway, the world is a-bustle with motion: the flight crew are running all their pre-flight checklists and securing everything for take-off, the ground crew is fueling the plane and loading the baggage, everyone’s milling about just trying to meet their schedules. The View from On Highĭavid Allen uses the metaphor of a plane in flight to explain the need to shift our focus to the big picture from time to time. Both the telephoto focus of getting work done and the wide-angle focus of sorting out who your are, what you’re doing, and where you want to be headed are important if you’re going to make any sort of life for yourself. The goal of any productivity system, then, isn’t to keep you focused on the tasks in front of you, it’s to allow you to direct your focus to all the aspects of your life when they need focus. When your focus is always on the next action, you can easily next action yourself into a dead-end, with no idea how you got there and no room to turn around. ![]() Thinking about the big picture too much can get in the way of our day-to-day lives – you don’t want to be dreaming about your life 20 years from now while you’re trying to get across a busy intersection with a broken traffic light! – but don’t let your day-to-day life get in the way of thinking about the big picture. But how does everything you do add up to a life? Or does it? It’s easy to get wrapped up in the details of any productivity system, all the fiddly little bits that fit together just so.
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