Clarity Before Action: Time Management Lessons from John Wick and Aliens
Where should you start when it comes to improving your time management? Believe it or not, a shopping quest to purchase the perfect calendar, app or other tool is not at the top of the list.
Instead, the most important first step you can take is to define. Define your priorities. It sounds simple, right? Yet so many people never do this. Click the graphic to watch my recommendations or scroll down to read about this important time management lesson:
Don’t Pull a John Wick
If you are a fan of John Wick, you may have picked up on patterns. When you observe people, this is how you can discover how they operate, and you can pick up on patterns about them. In the John Wick movies, any character who had any type of authority, any type of power over him, called him by his full first name, Jonathan.
Any of his colleagues in the underworld who feared him, at least in that moment, referred to him as John Wick.
Those characters in the movies who were not afraid of him, at least in that moment, called him John. That’s what his wife called him.
When he would watch video excerpts of his wife over and over and over again, those video excerpts tell the audience what the underlying theme has been in all of these movies. She says, “John. What are you doing, John?”
All the other characters are very clear about their relationships with him. He, however, is very unclear about what he needs to do next, which is why he is in reactionary mode the entire time. He spends the entire time running, running, running, running, running…only to end up exactly where he started.
If you are a character in a Hollywood movie, that’s great material, because John Wick can keep going and going and going until he has to move into a rest home. But if that’s how you spend your day, constantly reactionary, going, going, going…that’s not a good thing because you will get less and less productive.
John Wick needs to create some clarity. Like Ripley did in the movie Aliens.
Create Clarity like Ripley
If you’ve seen the second movie in that franchise, the Marines that she was on a mission with have been sliced and diced by aliens, and just the survivors are there in command central. Bill Paxton’s character, Private Hudson, starts whining, “What are we gonna do?! We’re all gonna die!!”
In the midst of all this murder and mayhem, Ripley pauses, takes a step back, takes a deep breath, and says, “Get me specs, get me grids. We need to come up with a plan.” Ripley understood that before you can go tactical, you need to be strategic.
She understands the C in my CIA acronym: Create clarity. This is where we started with my client, Nancy.
Creating Clarity by Defining Your Priorities
I asked Nancy what her top personal priorities are, and she said, “Well, duh. I already know what my priorities are.”
“Great. Share them with me.”
“Um, well, it was on the tip of my tongue.”
Most of us are like Nancy. Our priorities reside in the subconscious of our brains, and that’s why we tend not to make decisions based on how well the actions we want to take are going to support our priorities. We don’t think about our priorities until somebody specifically asks, “What are your priorities?” So, this is where we started.
Personal priorities – These are the most important people or the most important activities in your life. If you can’t immediately write down or type your top three personal priorities, they are not front and center in your brain where they need to be.
By the way, who should be at the top of this list? Exactly. Yourself. Not in an egotistical, condescending way, but in a self-care way.
If you’ve ever flown, you’ve heard that safety announcement that the flight attendants give when everybody’s not paying attention because they’re trying to send out their last text, or they’re trying to start up their movie. They say, “In the event that cabin pressure should change, air masks will come down from the ceiling.” Whose are you supposed to put on first?
Yours.
Because if you are not preserving yourself first, you will not be able to take care of everybody else around you as well. So, that’s why you should be at the top of your priorities list.
So there you go. Improve your time management by defining your top three personal priorities. You’ll be surprised how your decision-making will transform.
For recommendations on how to create clarity and define your priorities, check out The Inefficiency Assassin: Time Management Tactics for Working Smarter, Not Longer.
