WORK IN PROGRESS
THE Personal Effectiveness E-zine February 2005

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Evening review/Morning review - which works for you?

One of the most powerful routes to personal effectiveness involves a regular review of what has gone before and, even more importantly, where one's energies will be focused in the coming day. One thing to decide, however, is what review system works best for your own rhythms and circumstances.

Although there may be other variations, for the most part the systems can be summarized as involving (a) both backward and forward review in the evening, (b) both backward and forward review in the morning, and (c) backward review in the evening and forward review in the morning.

What do I mean by "backward review" and "forward review"?

A backward review is a review of a period of time that is past. In this newsletter I am referring to the day that has passed, but in other situations we may also choose to examine a week, month, quarter, or year as it ends - as do most major businesses. What did we achieve? Were there gains? Losses? What was going on? What interfered with our plans? What could we have done differently? Are there left-over loose ends that need to be tied up, or at least scheduled, before we get swept forward in the hurly-burly of the oncoming day? What are the lessons learned, the insights reached?

I find it particularly useful to those clients who tend to see themselves as less than fully effective to ask them to list their achievements before we talk each week. Often if they have not done this they will start their coaching session with concerns about what they have not done, and their lack of progress. However, if they complete what I call the "call focus form" they have listed, in one section, the things that they actually DID achieve, and they are often surprised to see how much they have done.

When it comes to the forward review, again, this may constitute a plan for the day, or for any longer period of time. (It is noticeable, however, that in these fast-moving times, even the larger, and therefore most long-term thinking companies create five-year or ten-year plans in only the lightest of penciled-in plans, for they know that the world will change in the meantime.)

For the day-long forward review, several things are important. One is that as we make that review, and plan for the coming day, we allow ourselves to step back and look at it in perspective. Where are the deadlines and the pressures? What is scheduled for specific times? What else has to be achieved between those scheduled times? When will we do which?

Elsewhere I have written of what I call "flex blocks" which enable us to more often absorb the sudden emergencies and unexpected events that tend to knock us off schedule. For example, suppose the morning and afternoon are scheduled for business events, and the evening for family - a fairly normal type of schedule for those who do not work from home. Comes the mid-morning phone call from the school nurse that Sally is sick, or injured, and needs to be taken to the doctor, and our business plans for the middle of the day are suddenly on hold. Our reaction to this is often simply to write off whatever we had planned for that part of the day, which can in some circumstances lead to problems. Another way to look at it is to realize that the emergency involved family time. Hence, if we mentally flex part of that family time from the evening to the time that we took Sally to the doctor, we can move the neglected business activity to the evening. Obviously this may not work if others are also involved, but many times it can be useful. Flex blocks enable us to feel less out of control when the unexpected arises. We can simply "drag and drop" two sections of our calendar so as to exchange them.

Flex blocks may fit between appointments and meetings, or may include them. It is a good idea to decide, during the forward review, what will fit where. It is unwise to assume that one will get to unscheduled things as and when time allows, without scheduling them. Time boundaries can get very fuzzy if we do that, with all of the day's unscheduled tasks somehow sliding back toward the end of the day and resulting in a last minute rush, or another evening of working late, neither of which is conducive to our feeling that we are in any way in control of our lives.

So what works for you?

Although it works for some people, I don't believe in leaving the backward review until the following morning. Too many nuances can be lost, or the morning rush can cause the entire review to be left undone "just this once." Another advantage of an evening review is that it can include the daily "gratitude journal" in which one writes at least five things experienced or observed during the day for which one is grateful. This is a life-changing ritual that I recommend to all.

The forward review, however, can be done either in the evening or first thing in the morning. If your mornings are habitually a chaotic rush of trying to get other people to do what they need to do before a deadline, then perhaps evenings are better for you. On the other hand, for some people having the forward review completed in the evening causes them to start working on the next day's issues when it is actually time for them to be relaxing at home, or even when they are trying to sleep. For them, a morning review may be the better way to go.

It was Socrates who commented "The unobserved life is not worth living." Developing the habit of carrying out a backward and forward review can help us to keep our lives under observation. It can also help us not to feel that we are being swept forward on a tide of time with neither paddle nor rudder. Journaling based on those reviews can record those observations for future comparison, which can be even more enlightening. But the topic of journaling is for another time.

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NEW!! Blog at ChoiceCoach.com

After dillying and dallying in a most un-coach-like manner, I have finally begun to write a blog at ChoiceCoach.com. I have not yet inserted the links into the main ChoiceCoach website, but you can access the blog directly at http://blog.ChoiceCoach.com.

I'm still getting the hang of all the software and how I "manage" the blog, since I only started working with it on Tuesday, so if you visit and things don't work as expected, please be patient.

Should you choose to visit the "About" section you will find the following information about the how and why of "Choice, Change, & Charybdis" which is what I have named it.

"Very shortly it will begin to reflect what I see as some of the important issues of life. I am a Personal Effectiveness Coach, so I am dedicated to helping people to become more effective in achieving whatever it is that they want to achieve. (Well, I'm not really into helping bank robbers be better bank robbers, but then again, developing a solid system of values and living by it is part of becoming truly effective.) Another part of my life involves teaching college students who plan to become Addiction Counselors. As a result, I have an interest in topics related to addiction. I am an active member of Al-Anon, so codependence and boundary-setting issues may appear here from time to time. I am originally from England and now live in the United States, so have an interest in international issues. Not being as young as I once was, issues of living in a society that is largely youth-oriented may come to my attention.

Then again, because I delight in the creative and the spontaneous it is very likely that at times this page will carry items unrelated to any of the above. Stay tuned.
In the meantime you may be wondering about the title. Choice, Change & Charybdis. Obviously, I like alliteration. Apart from that, in my eight years as a personal coach, and my mumble mumble mumble years of living, I've come to believe that these three words cover almost all of the dilemmas that we face in our lives.

I focus on choice in my coaching because I believe that knowing that we have choices is the most empowering of discoveries, and few of us are aware of how many choices we really have.

Change is an issue for many of us. Many of my clients and students are seeking change, and are frustrated because they cannot bring it about fast enough, or in the way that they envisage. Others are in the reverse situation, facing changes that they do not want. They often cannot imagine that life will ever again be "the same" - and they find that hugely disturbing. Learning how to flow with change, neither forcing it too swiftly nor resisting it too strongly, can be a major of learning how to live effectively.

(It must be admitted that I struggled with a choice here. Would the middle word be "change" or would it be "chance"? After all chance, with its dual meanings, also plays an important part in the effective life. One meaning involves the semi-random, "just by chance I noticed," serendipitous event. Although I must admit that I am often skeptical about the existence - or otherwise - of coincidence I certainly believe in serendipity. The other meaning relates to our willingness to take a chance, to risk. Too often we want to get to the other side of the river without being willing to let go of the river bank on which we are currently standing. We are afraid to take a chance. However, I see change as tending to be even more problematical for most people than chance, so I made my choice.)

More obscure is Charybdis, one of the two monsters between which Odysseus had to steer his vessel. There is a saying, "between Scylla and Charybdis" which, these days, is more often spoken as "between a rock and a hard place." It implies that there are two undesirable outcomes, and that the further away we steer from one the closer we are likely to get to the other. How often do we find ourselves paralyzed, unable to take action, because we are trying to decide how to live our lives without drifting too far toward either of two extremes? To fail to decide is often to decide to be ineffective."

I hope that you will visit the blog from time to time. Like all such efforts, it will not always please you. However, perhaps it will make you think, and at time perhaps it will relate to those issues that affect your search for greater effectiveness.

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TELL A FRIEND

I hope that you enjoy Work in Progress, and that it is useful to you. To pass its benefits on to a friend or colleague, please forward this issue, perhaps with the suggestion that they might like to subscribe.

Equally, if you or someone you know might benefit from a free sample coaching call (actually you pay the cost of the phone call but the coaching session is free) then please contact me either by e-mail or through the Guestbook page of my web site at http://ChoiceCoach.com.
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PLEASE! Any re-use of this material should include the words "Copyright Diana Robinson 2005. For more information visit Diana's web site http://ChoiceCoach.com or contact her at Diana@ChoiceCoach.com."

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