On Endurance Corner, you can find background to how, and why, I use couple retreats. I’m back from a week away with Monica – this is the third quarter (in a row) where we managed to spend a week together, outside of our normal lives.

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Technology Review

The pull of technology amazed me – it took five days for me to lose a powerful urge to check email and google news. I’ll need to do a better job with communicating my break next time as I inadvertently left a couple people in a lurch.

Creating a life where I can take frequent, extended breaks from email is on my to-do-list. Email contains my least productive hours but is a key communication route for a few people that are important to me.

Two years on from starting inbox zero, I’ve made progress. On my last email break (15 days, January 2011), I came back to thousands of messages that required days of sifting. The insanity of that life gave me a huge incentive change.

This week I came back to 175 messages, which took me an hour to sift down to 42 that I’ll action. I have a filter set up for athlete workouts and that’s another 235 messages to review.

In two years, the changes I’ve made have freed up the equivalent of one working day per week and I know that I’m still improving.

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Professional Life Review

The key question that I asked myself: In my working life, where do I add the most value?

Helping highly successful people optimize their time, learn from errors and structure their lives to achieve their goals.

Then I made a list of items that take my time that don’t directly contribute to the three key areas above. My action list for May is delegating/subcontracting those items.

Another way to ask the same question: Why am I paid to be on the team?

Considering my personal life, what does my spouse love doing with me? As it turns out, Monica loves unstructured, unscheduled time with me – and the opportunity to do her own training each day – and some time alone to read. At our core, we are very similar.

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Personal Review

Two years ago, I asked the question: What skill, if learned to the best of my ability, would change my life?

Contemplative study to enhance my ability to be clear in thought, advice and action // essential for me to be the man I want to be.

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Having spent the winter doing strategic planning, the main insights were about staying-the-course and areas where I can prune/simplify my life.

Hope this helps,

g