First of all: Thank you for your comments and support! When strugling with a weakness it always helps to know others care about you. Now for todays entry:

Planning and Yak shaving

At this point I bet about 90% of you are thinking "What in the world is Yak shaving?" If you have never heard of it then it's high time you become aquainted with it. You have all done it and probably do it on a regular basis.

I dont know the origin of the word but for those who don't know a Yak is a large hairy animal living in and around the Himalayas. Shaving one is not a task undertaken lightly. Yak shaving however has nothing to do with yak's or shaving. It has a lot to do with planning though. You could say it's everything that planning isn't. I'll explain it with a story.

John decided one day to get into shape. To do this he realized he'd need a gym pass. He also needed som exercising clothes. He then realized his wallet was missing. He looked everywhere for it until he remembered it was in his car. He rushed out to the parkinglot only to realize his wife was using the car that day. He decided to call her so he went back inside only to find that the phone was not in its holder. Looking for the phone he noticed what a mess the kitchen was and realized he would never find the phone if he didn't clean up the kitchen. So he started moving some things and throwing away some trash when he came across the TV-guide and noticed that a football game he had been looking forward to was airing that day. So ge got a soda out of the fridge and sat down to watch it. Having completely forgot the gym pass and excercise.

Sound familiar? Yak shaving is the art of making a decision only to discover that to do A you need to get B, and to get B you have to do C and in order to be able to even start with C you have to make sure D is in place and so it goes on until you reach that first "key event" that makes the rest possible or you give up in frustration, the latter being by far the most common.

I have spent a considerable part of my life Yak shaving. The result is that everything takes 10 times longer then anticipated and most of the time the sheer scope of all the things you have to do in order to get the thing you want now makes you back off and decide to do something else. Like watching TV. Or look at another clip on youtube.

Yak shaving is the epitome of the Reactive lifestyle. Always reacting and adapting to the surrounding trying to make the best of the moment never really making and sticking to long range plans. So how does one escape the reactive lifestyle and beat ones tendency to yak shave?

The main driving force behind the Proactive lifestyle is planning. When we think of planning we usually think of lots of papers and time sitting down thinking hard and writing big statements and putting dates in our calendars. The first lesson of planning is that no plan, however elaborate will succed if you cant find the next logical step.

For example. How does the plan "Go on a mission" sound? I'll tell you right now it's a terrible plan! (I got your attention now didn't I? :P ) But wait! you say. Isn't going on a mission a great plan? Yes going on a mission is a wonderfull experience that I recomend to everyone. But the statement "Go on a mission" is not a plan. It's an ambition. It sais nothing about what it means, what will be required of the young man/woman/senior couple, how one goes about going on a mission etc.

A good plan always has a logical next step. The next isolated smallest possible single action that will get you further along the road to your goal. It could be "Tell my bishop next sunday that I wish to go on a mission." Now we have a plan! From that single action many more will spawn. If analysed and broken down into its smallest possible parts you can start piecing together exactly what needs to be done. Then in a daily list you write only the actions that are the next logical step. Then do these and keep refilling the list with up to date logical next steps and before you know it you will be sitting on the plane flying to the MTC confident that you did everything that needed to be done when it needed to be done. (I on the other hand did it mostly the other way. Looking at the big actions and just barely got everything done in the last minute. All the while feeling really stressed.)

I'll end todays post with this. I promised myself my posts were going to be shorter then yesterdays but that doesn't seem to be possible. Tomorrow I'l give some more insight into how working with lists got me back on track. I'll just say this. Looking at todays list I realize that I wouldn't even have remembered half the stuff I did today if it hadn't been on there. And it was only the most important stuff I put on there. Well good night for now! See you all tomorrow!