So I have just finished reading David Allen’s latest book “Make it all Work”. Although it repeats a lot of what he covered in “Getting Things Done” it did help me to further my obsession with GTD.

When you read GTD the thing that immediately leaps out at you is the stress free system for managing all of the tasks and projects in your life. Where ‘Make it all Work’ is different is that it that it focuses on the bigger life goals and core values we all have. This was covered in GTD but like me many people overlooked this in favour of the more obvious benefits of task management.

Now that I have finished “Make it All Work” I decided to look at those tasks and project I have and organise them into areas of responsibility (something Things makes easy). I have then turned each of these areas of responsibilities into goals I have for my life and asked what I am trying to get from each. This has led to the following list (in order of priority):

1. Improve my family life - My family is my single biggest treasure. I have learn’t that it needs nurturing and caring for if it is going to be maintained.
2. Find mental wellbeing - As above. I need to be healthy mentally in order to be able to give to others, be a husband and dad as well as run my company effectively.
3. Experience more - I believe life should be lived to the full. You only get one chance to experience this world and you need to grasp that.
4. Have fun and relax - This is apart of living life to the full but also an understanding that if I do not look after myself then I cannot help others. This is more than a hedonistic desire.
5. Be healthy - Being fit increases my self esteem, gives me more energy and hopefully means I will remain active into my old age.
6. Learn and communicate best practice - I love learning new stuff and I love sharing that with others. This wins work for Headscape, satisfies a personal desire and keeps Headscape cutting edge.
7. Make work enjoyable for all - I spend so much time at work that it has to be fun. Not just for me but those that I employee to. I should want to go to work each day and if I do not then I am not living life to the full.
8. Connect with others - There are those I believe I can help and others I hope to learn from. For me experiencing life to the full is as much about who you connect with as where you go and what you do.
9. Make a difference - I believe that one should give more to the world than you take from it. In my mind this is a core principle. I can’t say I always want to live like this but its the right thing to do.
10. Make clients happy - This is primarily because I feel like shit when they are not happy. I hate it when people don’t feel they have got my best or that they have not received value for money from me. However, I also know from a business perspective that unhappy clients damages our business.
11. Ensure a smooth running company - When Headscape is not going well it makes everybody miserable. Myself, my co-founders and the entire team. This damages my mental wellbeing, undermines my relationships and becomes an overwhelming distraction from all other areas of life.
12. Create an effective design team - I have a passion for design and love working with my design team at Headscape. They are clever guys that I can learn from as well as have something to share with. Making them an efficient team fulfils my desire to learn and the desire to give to others.
13. Generate quality sales - Running a business obviously means bringing in sales. I actually enjoy doing this because I believe we have something special to offer. However, it is not just about staying in business. Its also about bringing in business we actually want to work on. That is a big challenge for me.
14. Household upkeep - I don’t enjoy dealing with the mundane aspects of life but I know that when I do not it begins to undermine my mental wellbeing. If the house is a tip I don’t want to be there. I cannot relax and I feel a constant sense of guilt.

Writing this list has really helped me to clarify what I am trying to achieve in my life. When new projects or opportunities come along I can look back at this list and ask whether that particular thing will help or hinder me in achieve those goals.
However, David Allen encourages us to go even further and ask why these goals are important to us (see my explanations above). Out of this emerges our core values. The things that shape who we are. I went through the process of extracting my core values from the above list and was fascinated by what I found:

• Give more than you take.
• Live life to the full.
• Love oneself - Don’t allow oneself to be overwhelmed and drained.
• Love others - Give unconditionally.
• Self improvement (physically, spiritually, emotionally and intellectually).
• Never stop learning.
• Family first.
• Work should be more than a facilitator of my other goals. It should be an experience in and of itself.

I guess this list of values is not much different to your own. However, having them written down in black and white puts a lot of things into context. It has given me a new perspective on my life and helped me better understand what motivates me.