If you had to choose between a busy life, or an effective life, what would you choose? So often in life we can find ourselves so frantically consumed by the things that mean so little.
We can get caught in the cycle where urgent stuff comes up and we're trying to balance that with the important stuff, but then we get stuff that's important and urgent, or important but not urgent, or urgent but not really important, and we can so easily find ourselves getting 'lost' in all this.
One of the most stressful times of my life was when I returned to the UK after spending a number of years living in New Zealand.
My time living overseas hadn't worked out too well for me and I'd ended up finding myself broke, homeless and having had lost everything I owned due to a string of bad decisions and crazy choices.
For the first month or so upon my return, I lived at my sister's house with her and my Mum while I got myself re-established.
At this stage of my life I was on the verge of going back to full time education, however I needed to find a way of generating income and my head was so busy thinking of all the possibilities and options.
I guess back then if I'd been asked to define what I was looking for, I don't think I would have been able to answer, as there was just such a wide variety of options that found themselves at war with the unending ideas I found rushing in and out of my head! I ended up going to one of the local churches for a couple of years, not for religious reasons, but I guess I just didn't know where else to go or do with my time as at the time I was unable to afford to go socialising or join any of the local gyms or clubs.
I'd go along to this church in the hope of meeting some new people and ideally, make some friends, however after a while, I found myself getting drawn into the very essence of the church culture, its rules and expectations, and in a number of its regular meeting groups.
There was always new 'stuff' to get involved in, but all this really did was give me more 'stuff' to do whilst my real aims and objectives still weren't being met.
In the meantime during the weekdays, I was now studying a course in business management, and I guess that in my head I knew that I wanted to do something really significant with my life after spending countless years going round in circles and living a fairly meaningless and self consumed lifestyle often fuelled by drink and drugs.
I wanted to be around successful people, people who were out there talking with authority and with confidence.
I wanted to be doing the things that successful people were doing whilst studying and trying to find a way to make a regular income and become self sustainable once more.
I began to remember how I'd been in the past when operating in my element, how hard I would work and at the things I would often achieve.
I remembered back to being a child when I would sit at home on Saturday nights with my parents and watch the usual 'junk' on TV.
One programme I could remember in particular was the Generation Game, hosted by Bruce Forsyth, the concept of which involved different generations coming together in competition against each other to undertake a series of challenges.
One particular challenge involved balancing and spinning plates, and whilst the expert had obviously had years of practice, the competitors only had a few minutes to practise and most of the plates would come smashing to the floor.
Unless you've had years of experience and you're confident and competent at balancing plates and this is the one thing you're contributing to the world, why would you invest time in this? I wonder how many metaphorical plates either you or I are trying to balance.
Sometimes it feels like all these numerous plates can drive us to the point of complete distraction! Busy-ness.
So, I'd met a man in the church I'd been visiting called Roger, he was a wise man and someone I grew to trust that I knew I could count on for wise council when if I ever found my life getting out of control.
One afternoon when I'd met Roger for a coffee and a chat, I'd began telling him about all the things that I wanted to achieve and about all the things I was at that time doing, when he asked me if I'd ever tried to pin down a tarpaulin during my time in the army, and he compared my life to a large tarpaulin being blown and flapped around by the wind.
It struck me that I knew I was busy and I thought I was even being effective and moving forward in my life, but I wasn't getting closer to what I wanted in life because I hadn't clearly defined what it was that I was even trying to achieve.
I wanted to do this thing over here, and that thing over there, whilst building a business and writing a book, whilst and making some friends and enough money to afford the kind of lifestyle that I'd once been accustomed to.
I guess that I believed that If I was able to find balance and achieve all these things, I would find find some value in my life and maybe even be seen as significant in the eyes of the others I was growing to know.
My strategy wasn't working! Roger asked me to tell him one thing that was important to me right now.
I had to stop for a few moments to think and the first thing that came to mind was that I wanted to get married some day and start a family.
I hadn't defined this at that point, and none of my busy-ness was helping me get towards this particular goal.
If you think about one thing in your life that's really important to you and you think about the tarpaulin flapping around, you have to get one corner pegged down in order to take control of it.
Once you've pegged down that one corner it might still flap about, but the entire sheet is no longer going anywhere.
In order to make the first step towards reaching this goal I needed to get my own house in order before I started a relationship.
At this stage I had been back in the UK after returning from overseas for maybe 5 6 months, I guess that although by body had returned in one piece, my head and my heart were still over 2,500 miles away on another continent.
I reflected upon the tarpaulin and realised that I hadn't even made a committed decision to even make the UK my permanent home once more.
I was struggling to find any depth of meaningful relationship and hadn't yet even committed to being resident back in just one place.
I realised that in order for me to start finding some degree of balance in my life I had to peg down the first corner of the tarpaulin, so this was what I done.
I can only describe making this decision as the feeling of lifting an unbearable dead weight from off of my shoulders.
I now had a focus, a starting point and a vision for how I could beging making this new place of residance HOME.
My other priority was that I wanted to help people, and I realised that I could enthuse and inspire people and help them grasp perspective of a situation and circumstances, helping them define what the important thing is in their lives.
What I was now able to do was to start choosing the stuff to invest my time into, and what I learned to do that day with Roger was set my priorities and stop plate balancing.
When you set your priorities you define what's ultimately important to you, and I achieved my goal, marrying my beautiful wife, Karen, on 28 July 2013.
I often get invited to business networking meetings, and on one occasion one of the guys told me about a meeting on a Wednesday night.
I told him that I would never be able to do a Wednesday night, because this is the one night a week I spend with my wife.
It's our date night, we go for dinner or, to the cinema, and that's my priority.
It's easy to get caught up in life with the busy-ness, the programmes, the agendas and all the stuff that's going on inside our heads, but is your life blowing around like a tarpaulin and not getting you any closer to the life you really want? Choose the important stuff.
Effectiveness rules!