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Moments: The Secret of Life (Your Inventory)

Written by: Swarup Dutta

Article Overview: So let’s put Moments to work for you! The Moments tool helps build your time through a continuous two-part process. The first part is taking an inventory of defining significant and simple moments for your past and present. The second is consciously trying to invest into your collection of moments every day. Let’s start with your inventory.

Moments: The Secret of Life (Your Inventory)

Your Moments: An Inventory

So let’s put Moments to work for you!

The Moments tool helps build your time through a continuous two-part process. The first part is taking an inventory of defining significant and simple moments for your past and present. The second is consciously trying to invest into your collection of moments every day.

Let’s start with your inventory.

I want you to see how individual moments have defined your life. I want you to see just how many or how few significant moments you’ve had in your life to date and how many simple ones you may have taken for granted through the years. To do this I want you to begin the process of regularly writing down the defining moments in your life. I’ll have you do this through a Moments journal. Use a blank journal, a notebook, loose sheets in a binder, your computer, or crayon and napkins – whatever works for you. Just make sure it is a medium you can keep and look back through in the future.

You can make this a personal journal that you just keep for yourself or you can create one with family or loved ones’ contribution. Mine is a joint one with my wife with our little boys’ help. The choice is yours.

If you already keep a gratitude journal, you can combine it with your Moments journal or you can keep separate journals. The choice is yours. For my family and my personal situation, I find it easier and more beneficial for me to keep separate journals. Do what works best for you keeping in mind that your daily journal entries should be insightful and motivating. If doing them begins to create stress and feels like work, simply test a new way of writing down your gratitudes and moments. If you accidentally skip a few days or you need a short break from the routine, that’s perfectly fine. Don’t ever let this incredible tool become stressful!

Your Moments journal serves multiple purposes to help you in your journey to gain more control of your time. The first is it helps put time in a better perspective. Time is relative. When we are stressed and hurried, it flies unmercifully by us at breakneck speeds. In what feels like a blink of an eye, it can pass through days, months, even years, slipping opportunity after opportunity right by us. However, the opposite is true as well. When we are relaxed, grateful and observant of all that we have done and experienced in the past and aware of the wonderful possibilities that each day brings, then time seems to slow down and open its opportunities up before us. Remembering and writing down your past’s defining moments and looking for new ones to log each day will put time in this better perspective for you.

The second purpose of your Moments journal is to keep you grateful. It will help you realize how rich your life has been to date and keep you from taking simple pleasures for granted. This can only help shift your mind’s focus to be more positively motivated.

And the third purpose of your Moments journal is to act as a measuring stick for your Clarity. Each evening you will be looking to record the defining moments of your day. Some will be the simple pleasures of the day, but others will be significant events. These defining significant events will be moments that move you toward the clear picture of your future, your Clarity. Because of your daily awareness and vigilance to record such events, you will actually help motivate yourself to create them! Think of this journal as a Clarity progress chart and accelerator.

Now to put your Moments journal to beneficial use and begin creating that all-important moments inventory.

Set aside a small amount of time every evening when you are most relaxed to record your journal entries. Five minutes or so is all you need. Now that sounds familiar, doesn’t it? For my family, we prefer doing our journals just before my young boys go to bed. Like I’ve told you in past modules, by every night I mean at least five nights a week. You’re human and your life doesn’t revolve around your journal entry process. It’s a tool to help you keep your behaviors working for you in time. Look for five nights out of each of your weeks to work on your Moments journal, and you will soon reap the compounding rewards of time working for you.

When relaxed and ready to work on your journal, first think back through your life and record any significant defining moments that come to mind. Spend only a couple minutes doing this, listing only one or two events. Your goal is not to write EVERYTHING, just what comes to mind in a few relaxed moments.

When you first start this process, you’ll have a lifetime of possibilities to choose from. The possibilities will almost seem overwhelming. Don’t worry! Just write a few. By going through this process a little every night you will begin to chip away at your mountain of choices. Don’t worry about being perfect, either. As you spend more and more time with your journal you may repeat writing down events that you’ve already recorded. That’s fine. Rather than dig through your journal entries to see if you may have already written a past defining moment, creating stress and wasting time, just recognize that certain events are important enough for you to list more than once.

Don’t worry about the order of your moments. Trying to write all of the significant moments in your life in their order of importance to you can create some stress. You’ll end up not listing good moments that do come to mind because you haven’t listed others that may hold more significance to you. Again, this process doesn’t work if you make it stressful. Just write what comes to mind. You will eventually get all of the important moments in your life as you continually go through this process.

When you list an event you can put as little or as much detail as you want with it. As long as when you look back through your journal and see your listed entry you recognize the importance it had in your life, you’ll be good to go. If you find it enjoyable to write down the details surrounding an event and the impact it had on your life, go for it. This is YOUR journal and your rules!

To help you get started, I want to give you some areas to think about that should give you a good spark of inspiration for your past moments. Think back to your personal relationships for great moments – your family, your friends, past loves. Don’t forget about moments in school, college, sports, hobbies, club events, work, business, church, and community service.

For me, my most significant moments have centered around my family. Ones that quickly came to mind when I started my Moments journal were my first kiss with my wife, asking Vicki for her hand in marriage, our wedding day, our honeymoon, stepping off my plane to see her after six months of Naval separation, the birth of our boys, and moments with my parents and sisters. Other areas for me so far have included graduations from high school and college, my first job, flying in the Navy, trips around the world, starting my business, and time with friends.

After brainstorming a few past significant moments, think for a minute on any simple defining moments from your past. These are the day-to-day pleasures since your childhood that bring a smile to your face and a warm memory to heart. What made you happy as a child? What about as you were growing older in high school? What did you used to enjoy that you have since taken for granted when you were a young adult? Continue this thinking process to present day. Again, you will face a large group of possibilities. Just choose one or two, not worrying about any order of importance or time. This is very similar to the process for a gratitude journal except rather than focusing on the present you are allowing yourself to go through your entire life.

Lastly, look at today. Write down any significant and simple moments that come to mind from today. That’s it!

Through the entire five-or-so-minute nightly process, you should come up with one or two past significant events, one or two past simple moments, and any significant or simple moments that defined today for you. Remember, don’t let this become stressful. Make this fun and something you look forward to every night. The rewards will be worth it.


Hear the full audio at www.timecontrol.cc

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