At the start of last year I decided to pick three words that would be my mental framework for how I shape my days. After much thought, I decided the choose Ground, Stretch and Reflect as my three words. As I wrote then, “A conceptual framework isn’t a goal or a detailed plan. It’s more like a mental structure by which you bring order and organization.”
Having lived by the framework for 2012, I decided that it fits me really well and that there is no need to be creative or different and come up with a new set of words for 2013. So I share with you again my three words, this time with a year’s experience behind the framework.
The Ground word means that I will spend time daily grounding myself in that which is most important and foundational to me. Since that is my Christian faith, it requires me to spend time in basic Christian disciplines such as Bible study, memorization, and prayer. Ideally, I would get up early and do this before the rest of my day, but the truth is that I’ve always been more of a night person than a morning person, so it’s just easier for me to take some evening time to do this. My periodic attempts to set the alarm back an hour just don’t seem to last for too many weeks. The danger in waiting until evening is that I get involved with other things and don’t get it done. If it’s important to me, though, I will find the time.
Stretch means that I will try to excel at what I do throughout the day – not just get by with the minimum expectations that others may have for me or that I may have for myself. If I have talents and passions, they ought to be stretched to the max – no excuses – be they work related or personal endeavors.
To Reflect means that I will also take time at the end of each day to ponder what has happened and try to make sense of it all. It meant last year that I wrote a daily lesson learned, and I will continue that in many of my every-other-day blog posts here for 2013. But even on days when I don’t write about it, I need to do it. Asking questions like the following helps: What happened today that taught me something? What did I do well that I’m proud of? What did I drop the ball on? Did I make a positive difference in someone else’s life today? Did I treat others around me the way I want them to treat me? Was I someone to whom my Lord would say “Well done, my good and faithful servant”?
The framework of Ground, Stretch, Reflect works for me, so I’m staying with it. Do you have such a framework yourself? If so, what is it? If not, think about it.
“Am I in Louisville?” That was the surprising question I was asked tonight by some random guy driving by in a pickup truck while I was out walking my dog. He stopped near me, called me over and asked the question. “Yes,” I answered. Then he asked me how to get to the Greyhound bus station. I gave him quick instructions that would get him in the general direction about seven miles away where he could then ask someone there for final directions.
Thanks to a holiday week with far fewer interruptions and meetings than normal, I got completely caught up in my email inbox at work and home today. What a wonderful, rare moment when I realized that I had no emails waiting on me in either place! Aaaahhhhhhh……… the bliss!
This week I tried something new in my scheduling at work. I blocked out all morning hours on my calendar between 7:30 and noon to work on major, newer initiatives. There is always a much longer list of tasks to get done than can be done, but the issue that was starting to bother me was the feeling that my days were more and more dominated by the emails, calls, messages and unplanned conversations initiated by others than they were by major accomplishments I want to achieve. The obvious problem is that allowing my schedule to be dominated by others leaves no time to get the big picture, important things done – ground that needs to be taken in order to look back at the end of the year and say “This is how I made a significant difference.”
As you might suspect, pulling off an eight-day trip to China takes planning. There are the logistics of obtaining passport, visa, flights, insurance, hotels, ground transportation, admission and ticket info to various tourist spots, and more. In our effort to visit churches and take part in services, there was coordination to have participants from multiple churches celebrate with us in one place on days and times they would not normally gather . We needed to arrange an interpreter to be with us for such visits in order to speak to the congregations.
For the last few years I have occasionally taught a webinar on the contents of the book 
I don’t like clutter. It drives me batty. Regardless of the context – home, office, retail stores, classrooms, churches or anywhere – I vote for order and neatness. It would suit me completely to pull up a big truck in front of my house today and empty half of what fills every room into it, never to be seen again except by the people who take it off my grateful hands. I would wish them well and send them on their way as I strolled back into a simpler lifestyle.
I hate being late for anything, especially something that has been on my calendar for a while. In the absence of physical or mechanical barriers that cause a significant last-minute delay, there is really no excuse for being late.
I recently read about some people I follow on Twitter who annually choose three words to provide the framework for how they go about their days in the year ahead. I found the idea intriguing. A conceptual framework isn’t a goal or a detailed plan. It’s more like a mental structure by which you bring order and organization to a matter.
