My Father’s Acronym

D.O.S.E.

While growing up, Dad was always reminding me of how staying “on the ball” reaped great reward.

Often, whenever my bedroom was beginning to turn into something like a biology tour at the Natural Science Center, he would simply say, “Nathan, It’s time for D.O.S.E.”!

After several years of working this philosophy into me, I began to see that it pays serious dividends.

Franklin Covey’s 4 Quadrants of Success talk about the benefits of living most of your life in the second quadrant: Important but Not Urgent. In this quadrant the majority of your life looks proactive rather than reactive.

But how do we get there? How do we escape a lifestyle of living in the tyranny of the urgent? How can we get more done and be more “on the ball”?

I’m not a advocating a naive pragmatism of self help. “Just do it” and “pull up your boot straps” isn’t always the answer. There are a host of things to discuss here.

But first – the acronym: D.O.S.E.

Discipline, Organize, Simplify, Energize

Discipline is where it all starts. If people could, they would just snap their fingers and have that extra dose of necessary motivation to “just do it” in any given area. Everyone wants more discipline, but how does one actually get it?

It’s to the subject of discipline that we’ll look first; the nature of it, the developing of it, and the maintaining of it.

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