My Areas of Responsibility at the End of July 2025

It's 2:20 PM Eastern on Friday and I have been having difficulty staying on top of my blogging this week, but I will try to ease myself back into the groove by outlining my Getting Things Done (GTD) Areas of Responsibility for this summer Q3 of 2025. Friday afternoons from 12:30 to 5 PM are starting to feel like they could become the new Weekly Review anchor for my GTD practice. I have been trying and failing to successfully and consistently implement GTD since 2012. Maybe this time around I can master some disability accommodations that make it stick. I am not convinced the GTD system is beyond my capabilities.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I was a student of Stephen Covey's First Things First (FTF) methodology. The more I think about it, the more I realize that I want to relearn the FTF system alongside the GTD system. The FTF system is centered on a weekly Quadrant II organizing session (cf. Eisenhower Matrix) made up of the following elements:

• Step 1: Connect with Your Vision and Mission
• Step 2: Identify Your Roles
• Step 3: Select Quadrant II Goals in Each Role
• Step 4: Create a Decision-Making Framework for the Week
• Step 5: Exercise Integrity in the Moment
• Step 6: Evaluate

Applying this process to my current moment in time, I see that I need to tweak my current mission statement, from "Testing the Spirits on a Journey to Wholeness, That Our Joy May Be Complete" to "Testing the Spirits on a Journey to Net Zero 2050, That Our Joy May Be Complete." Okay, done.

Advancing to Step 2, my roles in FTF are basically the same as my Areas of Responsibility in GTD. Here is a first shot at seven roles:

• Center = Prayer
• Zenith = Spiritual Direction
• Nadir = World Citizenship
• North = Hermitage
• East = Healthcare
• South = Family Support
• West = Music of the Spheres

I could play around with these some more, but it is 5:07 PM and I need to transition into my evening block. Let's see what happens if I leave Getting Things Done, First Things First, and Mission Statement untouched until next Friday afternoon. I am provisionally putting all three of these projects under my Spiritual Direction role/Area of Responsibility.