Here's one way to simplify your life:
- Define what's important to you. For me, it's God, family, health and finances. An easy way to get started is to list the top 3 things that relieve stress for you and the top 3 things that cause you stress.
- Make a list of everything you've done over the last month. Everything. I use a planner so this was fairly easy. If you don't use a planner, just make the list as comprehensive has you can.
- Rank your activities. This is where the nerd in me kicks in. I ranked each of the activities by determining how each related to the things that are important to me. I assigned a value between -10 and 10 to each activity in each category like this: "Activity = Family time: God = 7, Family = 10, Health = 0, Finances = -3 (since we sometimes spend money for family time it gets a negative number) , for a total of 14 (7 + 10 + 0 - 3).
- Stop doing anything that has a value less than 3. It's not worth it. It's not valuable based on what you've determined to be important in your life. Don't stop tomorrow. Stop today.
This exercise may take you a little time to complete, but it's worth it. Your schedule will be freed up to spend time doing the important things instead of being caught in the "busy with life" tornado.