The number one problem you have with creating and sustaining your attractiveness, is that you give attention to time-sinks and the urgent but unimportant stuff, while you neglect the non-urgent but important stuff.
Take a peek at the classic Four Quadrants from Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey.
The most important quadrant is the first one. You just have to do this stuff and that’s all there is to it. So you do that stuff as a matter of course. Moving on…
The second quadrant is very important too. But because nothing in there is urgent, it’s tempting to skip on it. If you miss a day in the gym, nothing happens to you. There’s no immediate consequence for eating a cupcake. If you don’t go back to school for advanced training, you don’t get fired from your current job. If you don’t plan out your goals for the year, no one yells at you. But skip doing the second quadrant for long enough, and lo and behold you’re Captain Cupcake in a shitty job and no plan for the future…
…there doesn’t seem to be a consequence for all that lack of effort until you’re at a party and your wife hands you her purse and spends the rest of the night twirling her hair at some asshole. Now she’s just laughing at his jokes. Now she slapped his arm and wagged her finger at him like he did something wrong… but she’s grinning at him.
WTF! She just leaned in and whispered something to him… what the hell did she say??!?!
It’s easy to totally neglect quadrant two, in favor of quadrant three and four. So let’s talk about that.
Troubles in quadrant three are typically resolved by time management. The truth of the matter is that at least half the people you work with are vacuous warm bodies, wasting the planet’s precious resources by their mere existence. Every time you have to interact with one of these people, you lurch into the third quadrant. But you do have to interact with them somehow. So productive people tend to structure their day to condense their exposure to the herd. They get into the office early and work like crazy to get as much done as possible before… ah… here comes frakking Jerry making his way across the office like a sloth… don’t make eye contact, don’t make eye contact… ah crap he’s coming right here… ah fabulous, he wants to talk about the quarterly report filing system protocol revision that was discussed at the staff meeting held two weeks ago. Maybe if you went to the meeting you’d know.
See how that whole paragraph got padded with a waste of time. I think I actually got a slight touch of PTSD just writing the phrase “quarterly report filing system protocol revision.” Jennifer is gonna groan during editing too lol. (Jennifer: OMG yes. I get more done before 10am than in the entire rest of the day when the office is full of people asking me questions lol.)
Anyway, the other thing you can do is limit when you look at email, make phone calls or whatever it is that you do. Find a way to structure your day to make it as efficient as possible. Find the time lost into the ether of idiots. Use that time to do your quadrant two stuff.
Quadrant four is just all purpose time wasting, which is admittedly fun sometimes, but if done at the expense of quadrant two, you’re in trouble. Classic quadrant four time-sinks are Facebook, Farmville, World of Warcraft, mindless day time TV, standing outside having a cigarette for a total of 1.75 hours of your work day (Seriously will someone please fire those useless sandbags!), a six pack a couple of times a week, yada yada yada. No productive purpose + heavy effort = a meaningless time-sink.
In one very meaningful sense, all the MAP is doing is getting you to drop as much quadrant four stuff as you can and replacing it with quadrant two. You’re going to eat right. You’re going to work out. You’re going to not just let things slide between the two of you. You’re going to find your way to a better income. You’re going to fix the house up. You’re mowing the lawn, changing the oil, and not letting the kids get away with murder. There are probably some ways you can squeeze some found time out of quadrant three, but the easy move is dumping quadrant four for quadrant two.
And yeah, it’s a bit boring at times. You could be knocking a few cold ones back, but instead you’re at the gym. It’s not always fun, it’s hard work, but there will be a pay off eventually. Keep at it long enough and one day you’ll be out having fun chatting to some hot MILF you just met and having a good time… but dimly aware of some tubby dude holding a purse glaring at you for no apparent reason…
…then the MILF leans in and whispers something in your ear…
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