No. This is not a an activist posting 
. This is in the personal development / things I (re)learnt category.
This is an affirmation of something I learned in personal coaching at work. Basically I have been dealing with a lot of frustration in my personal life. From being seemingly incapable of making up my mind whether I should buy or rent a home, or a flat for that matter; to enduring an accommodation setup which clearly frustrated me without doing anything pro-active about solving the issue.
One of the lessons I learned in personal coaching about dealing with my frustrations is that the time to act is now. In other words the sooner you become aware of any problem in your life / work etc., the best thing to do is to act immediately to resolve the matter. If you don’t, the frustration/problem tends to simmer and brew until it boils over or you reach the point where you feel totally powerless (paralysed by anger/fear) to do anything about it. An analogy from the programming / crime-fighting world is the “no broken windows” policy (fix small problems before they become big ones or don’t tolerate any problems for that matter).
Today I had to learn this lesson again. I am currently looking for a new place to rent. As I mentioned at the beginning of this post; I have been living in an accommodation setup which is not working for me. It has not been working for me for quite some time now and has been one of the big causes of my constant irritable state.
On the 1st of December (not very good timing on my part) I decided to act and give notice to my landlord. Since my contract actually ran from 1 December one year to the next, I was lucky to be able to get out of next year’s contract. But… to give my landlord enough time to find a new tenant; I pledged to be out before 1 January next year.
I think I did this short-notice notice move to:
a) Prevent myself from staying in the same setup for another year.
b) Force myself to find a new place and find it quick, since I have to find new accommodation before 1 January next year.
That’s all good and well… but to find the new accommodation. It seems that in some parts of the world the local newspaper is still the best place to find fresh and juicy adverts for property to let. So; I learnt that the local paper for the town I want to move to is published on Thursdays. Which happened to be today. I decided I will get the paper early and make sure I phone to follow up any promising leads.
Guess what happened. I woke up a bit late. I did decided since I am already behind on a work project I’d better get to work rather. Which I did. So I went to buy the newspaper over lunch. But since I was still at work and not making good enough progress with my current project; I decided to look at the rental adverts after work and phone to follow up any promising leads then.
No surprise as to the outcome of this decision. A full 9 hours probably passed between the time I expect reasonable people to start phoning (8am) to enquire about the adverts and when I finally got round to phoning. The most promising rentals I phoned to enquire about were of course already taken by the time I phoned.
If I had woken up earlier, got the paper and phoned to follow up promising rental adverts at about 8 am I would have:
a) Probably been able to land one of the promising rentals.
b) Felt good because I have at least done something to address an important issue in my personal life.
c) Be able to get on with my work, since I have already taken care of my peronsal issues.
This corresponds to taking care of your Most Important Tasks (MITs) or “big rocks” first; as Leo from Zenhabits (http://zenhabits.net) suggests in his simplified productivity method. Sometimes your most important tasks for a given day just happens to be related to your personal life, other times it probably is work-related.
Either way… the best time to act is and always will be NOW!
