I woke up at 2:27am this morning. I stupidly forgot to switch the radio off on my Blackberry and so the splurge of UK emails started coming through with a regular (2 minute) cadence. I decided to get up and do some work, but then had a ‘lightbulb moment’ in terms of things that have been on my mind for some time.

Management classics have something about 3’s and 5’s. The story goes that people can manage about 3 (or maybe 5) things in their active foregound at anytime. 3’s and 5’s shouldn’t work for me (I have a big thing about symmetry and even vs. odd numbers), but I’ve found that it works very well. I guess I think of it as an even number of things, plus 1. It’s also amazing how others relate to simple lists with 3 or 5 things in them. I find it a very useful tool.

That got me thinking about how I could classify what’s important and what’s not by coming up with lists. Now of course there was the debate in my mind of ‘is that 3 lists of 5, or 5 lists of 3 ?’. In the end I came up with 3 lists:

• People – who add something positive and when around them feel significantly happier than when I’m not
• Places – where I feel happy and positive, regardless of anything else that’s going on day-day in life
• Things – that are important and I feel passionate about

I grabbed 3 pieces of hotel notepaper (they seem to have crafted the size of the paper perfectly for taking notes and making lists):

‘Things’ was the easiest of them all, 5 things rattled off my head instantly, only 1 suprising omission from the list. Places and people were far more interesting. Additions I hadn’t considered were suddenly important, as well as another theory – it’s not “what’s on the list” that’s important, it’s “what’s not on the list”.