What is a category?
A category is an area of life for which you want to constantly improve. For
example, you may have a category called “losing weight”. This is something you
want to work on every day. You may have another category called “Finance”, where
you move toward financial freedom by continuous saving or searching for a
high-pay job. A category called “family” may be for someone who wants to find a
husband/wife and have children together. Here is an example of a person’s list
of personal categories: 1. Fitness and Health; 2. Family 3.Friendship
4.Communication Skill; 5.Financial Freedom 6. Charity and volunteer work 7.Learning.
There are two major areas of categories: personal and professional (work).
Professional categories include “team”, where building a successful team is
something you have to constantly work on. Communicating with team member,
sharing project goals, and even creating social gatherings are things you do
constantly. Another professional category may be “networking”. The goal of
networking is having more people help you reach you goal. . Here is an example
of a person’s professional categories: 1.Team; 2.New ideas; 3.Networking 4.Product Knowledge;
5.Contribution 6.Writing and speaking skill.
The number of categories
If you have too many categories, you will be overwhelmed. Instead of having 3
categories like ”swimming”,”running” and “weight lifting”, you can have one
called “exercise”, or even a better one called “Fitness and Health”. Under this
general category, you can group all the activities together. This is much easier
to manage.
In general, a person should have no more than 10 categories in either personal
or professional area. The small number of categories allows you to track your
progress every day, and keep an eye on your goals and ultimate vision.
Connect categories to daily actions
Do you have too many to-do items? Are you overwhelmed with your tasks? If you
group all of your to-do items under categories, they become much more
manageable. First of all, you have a clear sense why you are doing each to-do.
If you need to “pick up the kid”, you look at its category “family” and
understand it is part of your purpose of having a happy family life. Second, you
start to pay attention to all categories. This allows you to create a balanced
life. If all your to-do items are in categories like “financial freedom” and
“learning”, you realize you did not give enough time to “family”.
On our iLifeCoach site, categories are seamlessly tied to to-do items. When you
create a category, it will automatically show up as one of the choices for to-do
items.
Start to create your categories today.
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