Life on Purpose

We now turn to ‘everything else’. Whilst you and I have our life purposes, our dreams and our goals, within them there is still much else going on in the routine of life and it depends on our personal circumstances what this is. You and I need a ‘system’ to manage everything we do, not to ‘fit in’ achieving our goals and realising our vision but to make that work with all the other activities we carry out that aren’t part of our vision plan.

They are however part of our ‘life plan’. We need to sleep and eat, we need to take exercise, we may have a family or partner to interact with and perhaps fit in with their plan. We may be in some kind of employment working for someone else, running our own business, or being in a caring capacity.

In the Resources area you’ll find a set of tools to create your own ‘personal operating system’ based on a set of methods of operation, daily and monthly but also weekly as our days are artificially arranged into ‘weeks’ of seven days. I’m not sure where ‘weeks’ came from, but it may have something to do with spiritual properties ascribed to the number 7. Weeks don’t mean much but they are useful. You can also decide to work by artificial calendar months or by lunar months of approximately 28 days – new to new of full to full, it’s up to you.

We don’t set up an annual MO, it’s too long to plan, but we will have some landmarks or ‘way points’ during each year such as quarterly or 90-day periods. Perhaps setting a goal for each of these ‘periods’. We’ll also look at the overall ‘dream timescale of approx. 3 years. As far as ‘purposes’ are concerned these might be envisaged over a period of 7-7-7. Seven years, seven months and seven days, a period which has cropped up in various writings over the centuries.

It’s up to you to decide on your cycles of operation. Essentially there are things you do every day; things you do every week and things you do every month. The annual events don’t really need planning, just noting on the system – they happen whether you plan them or not.

In your system you’ll have two (at least) streams of operation. In project management I used to refer to these as workstreams. They go on concurrently but are nor necessarily related or connected.

One of these streams is your vision or dream ‘work’ and the other(s) your ‘functional’ activities or work. For example, let’s surmise you have vision, family and employment/business to be working on. Any work on your ‘self’, exercise, meditation learning and so on would be part of the vision workstream (it should be an integral part of your vision anyway) and part of your vision may well be integrated to some extent with your family, your job or business.

How you segment your ‘life space’ should be led by your vision rather than the achievement of your dream being made to ‘fit in’ and resultingly take second or even third place to the ‘other’ parts of your life.

The next thing to consider is matching what you do on a regular basis to the four domains of life, and this is also true for your vision activities. However, there are some things we have to do to stay alive and although these are technically part of the domain of Self, we’ve separated them out into a neutral ‘domain’ in the MO. These include sleeping, eating, preparing food, hygiene and cleaning, washing and basic grooming. General maintenance of our ‘shelter’ also comes in here.

Some of your activities, for instance a meal out or a concert, would go into the lifestyle domain as would redecorating a room in your home. Taking time out to relax or going on holiday would fit into the Self and Lifestyle domains and may even include the other domains. It’s your choice how you categorise these, just use your intuition and judgement. Which ‘feels’ right?

If you get it ‘wrong’ your sprit guides will let you know. It just won’t feel right, and you may get occasional unexplained aches and pains or itches – that’s how they pass messages!

Your next step is to use the toolkit to plot your life patterns on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. Just modify the spreadsheets provided using different depths of colour to differentiate the various ‘life streams’ going on with the brightest for our vision or dream stream.

In the next module we’ll discuss some other things you need to add and how you can keep track of it all. Youi can file your system outline with you other ‘Mission Control’ material. At this stage you don’t need to quantify what you’re going to be doing – we’re coming to that!