Wisdom-Trek / Creating a Legacy
Welcome to Day 808 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.
This is Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to Wisdom
Tools for Self-Management - Ask Gramps

Thank you for joining us for our five days per week, wisdom and legacy building podcast. This is Day 808 of our Trek time for our Philosophy Friday series.  Each Friday we will ponder some of the basic truths and mysteries of life, and how they can impact us in creating our living legacy.  As we continue on this trek called life, sometimes we have questions about life, so our Friday trek is a time where we can ‘Ask Gramps.’   Gramps will answer questions that you would like to ask your dad or granddad, but for whatever reason, this is not possible.  No matter how old you are, I know that all of us would like the opportunity to ask dad or gramps questions about life in many areas.  We will address areas such as finances, relationships, health/fitness, business/work, home repairs/renovations, seasons of life, spiritual/Biblical questions, and any others areas that come our way.  As your fellow sojourner and mentor on this trek that we call life, it is my goal to provide you with practical wisdom and advice about any area of life. It is crucial that I receive a constant flow of questions so please submit your questions to guthrie@wisdom-trek.com, and I will answer your questions on our Friday podcast.

We are broadcasting from our studio at ‘The Big House’ in Marietta, Ohio.   Last week we explored why Time Management is a Myth.  Gramps helped us to realize that we can’t manage time, all we can do is to manage ourselves by making decisions and choices that focus on what is most important in our lives, and what will have the greatest positive impact.   We want to expand on this, so the question for today is:

Hey Gramps, “How do you specifically stay focused on those tasks, obligations, and responsibilities so that you are most effective and have the biggest impact ?”
Tools for Self-Management
Granny and I stay very busy with all aspects of our life which includes managing our own two small companies as well as the financial or technical support work for five other companies.  Let me share with you the four simple tools that help us to stay focused and not miss any of the many very important time-sensitive tasks that we are required to complete on a monthly basis.

Fortunately, most of the work we do for our client can be done remotely, so we can literally work from anywhere we have an internet connection.   We have selected tools which can be accessed on any device we happen to be working on, so even if we are not at our own in-office computers, we can access all personal and client information from other computers, our smartphones or our tablet devices.  Here are the four tools.

Gmail for email: We switched several years ago to this platform because of the flexibility and accessibility from any device.  Email still remains a crucial aspect of communications internally and with our clients.  We have all of our email accounts for personal and multiple businesses populate into a common inbox, so we have one repository for all communications.
Google Calendar: We place all travel related events as well as all personal and business engagements which have a specific date and time with it on our calendar.  This calendar also lists all birthdays, appointments and important events.  A companion application to this which resides on our smartphone is called Tiny Calendar.  Granny and I share a common calendar, so we are always aware of any upcoming events.  At the beginning of the year, we plan out as much of our calendar as possible for the year.
Go Task: This smartphone app allows me to log all tasks that I have to accomplish during the day, but these tasks do not have a specific time of day related to it.