“Where your talents and the needs of the world cross, lies your calling, vocation, purpose.” —Aristotle

Merriam-Webster defines purpose as “the reason why something is done or used : the aim or intention of something.”  Oftentimes we get so busy in life that we forget our Why and just focus on surviving the week.  Have you ever sat down to think about the intention for your life or why you do what you do? Eric and I spent many hours pondering these existential questions and tried to uncover how we want God to use us in this life. Our definition of a purposeful life includes being great parents and raising our children to be significant contributors to society, helping others find joy in their lives, and leaving behind a legacy that will have positive impacts for generations to come.  If you haven’t thought about your purpose, I encourage you to invest some time pondering these things so you can live a full life aligned with your core values.

• What legacy do you want to leave behind for your family and the world?

• What can you offer the world that no one else can fulfill?

• What are you good at that most people can’t do?

• If you knew you had one year to live, how would you spend that time?

After you define what your purposeful life looks like you can begin to structure your time in a way that helps you fulfill your purpose.  Gino Wickman’s new book The EOS Life is a great tool for gaining clarity on living your purpose.  On page 7 of the book, Gino says “The EOS Life is you doing what you love, with people you love, while making a huge difference, being compensated appropriately, and having time for other passions.”  This really resonated with me as I am trying to find my ideal life without the time constraints of a full time job but it can be helpful for anyone.  Gino uses the Delegate and Elevate worksheet to help business owners determine which tasks and projects should be kept with the owner and which should be removed from their list.  He recommends you list all the things you work on in a given week on a sheet of paper.  Once you are done, sort them into these four quadrants.  Anything on the bottom half of the page should be delegated or removed from your role.

Eric and I completed this exercise and included all our household chores in addition to our work duties.  It provided great clarity for us and we moved some tasks between each other to allow us to work on the items we enjoy while our spouse takes care of the things we don’t enjoy.  For example, Eric had doing the dishes on his list while I managed grocery shopping.  We realized that I enjoy doing dishes and Eric hated it but he enjoyed my least favorite chore of grocery shopping.  We moved those tasks around and both of us have less frustration in doing these necessary household chores.  If Eric also didn’t enjoy grocery shopping we would consider a meal kit company like Hello Fresh to provide our groceries or pay for curbside pickup or grocery delivery.  By freeing up our time from tasks we don’t enjoy we can focus on things that are revenue generating to cover the increased expense of delegating these tasks to someone else.

We completed the exercise with a slight modification; we added Automate as an option. We realized many of the tasks we work on could be automated and either completed with technology or assigned to a Virtual Assistant. This would free up time and mental bandwidth to focus on our key priorities and not get muddled down in simple repetitive tasks. Sam Carpenter’s book Work the System has great tips for automating your business and life allowing you more time freedom to focus on the important things in life. In our life, we realized Eric was spending a lot of time managing maintenance requests from our tenants. We were taking the request from the tenant in either text, email, or through our management portal then messaging our contractor asking him to fix it and following up when the work was completed. Instead of being the middleman, we decided to add our contractor to our management portal and require all tenants to submit requests through the portal from now on. Our contractor can coordinate with the tenants directly to get the work done faster and Eric is no longer part of the equation. Our tenants will get a faster response from the contractor so they will get better service, the contractor can complete the work faster so he can complete more jobs, and we are no longer worried about managing these tasks. It is a win-win-win situation for everyone. How can you create similar changes in your life to either automate, delegate or eliminate tasks from your schedule?

Another great way to live a purposeful life is to create a Life Energy List.  This concept comes from Emily P Freeman and more information can be found here. The idea is to write down what is life giving and life draining for you.  This has been helpful for me to dig into the areas of life I enjoy and which ones I should reassess.  I like to think about several areas of life including some of the below and determine for each item what gives me energy and what leaves me exhausted at the end of the day. 

• Work projects

• Relationships

• Hobbies

• Morning routine

• Volunteering

• Exercise

• Household chores

As I list each item, I mark it with a plus or a minus depending on how I feel it impacts my life energy.  Once I complete my list I assess which items or relationships I should spend more time on and which ones I should consider spending less time on.  This gives me clarity and helps me focus on living my purposeful life.

How can you make the time you spent reading this blog worthwhile?  Is it pondering your purpose and what you want out of life? Reading one of the books mentioned? Creating the Delegate and Elevate worksheet or writing out your Life Energy List? or something else?  Don't let the time you just invested go to waste.  You only get one life so live it purposefully!