Notepad by your bed

 “The ability to subordinate an impulse to a value is the essence of the proactive person”.

When I first read this, the most obvious example that came to my mind is the notepad by my bed and the white board on the wall in my office. Both are places where random thoughts go for processing later. These random thoughts come to me while I’m sleeping (or trying to sleep), or focused on another task. If I can put them on paper for review later, I can then assign a value it. Maybe this is an actual monetary value, or an order in which it will be done. Regardless of what you do with it, once it is down on paper, it has been released from the ‘here and now’, and your attention can be refocused back to the task at hand.

Original concept by Stephen Covey, The Wisdom and Teachings of Stephen R Covey