Your First Audit!

Hello, again friends,

 

Today I am writing to you with some actionable words of wisdom and advice, we are leaving the ramblings of my previous letters, albeit for one week, and am going to focus on something that you can do to broaden your understanding of what is happening in your life and town.

 

The basics of an audit are to just record what happens whilst doing a specific task for a certain period of time. Now the first time you do an audit, I would ask that you do it for one day and that you broadly record the things that enter your mind or press upon your time during the times between waking up and going to sleep.

 

What are the things you will need to make this work:

1. Pen
2. Notepad
3. (Recommended) Excel spreadsheet

The goal of this exercise is to be more aware of where we spend our time and what intrusive thoughts rattle through our brain on a daily basis. Now I appreciate that with busy schedules and our brains not usually staying on one topic for very long, you may not be able to record everything that goes on completely. This is absolutely fine. What I would advise is that you try to capture the main ideas, moods or emotions that you are feeling throughout the day, and if making notes whilst working is not the most practical exercise then maybe a few notes when you finish work about what you do remember will definitely help!

 

Your day may look a little similar to the below:

• 08:00 – Wake up – Man I am still feeling tired as hell.
• 08:20 – finally get out of bed – played red dead redemption 2 for motivation to wake up.
• 09:00 – Leave for work – burnt my toast this morning – feeling rushed.
• 09:32 – walk into work – 2 mins late, boss gave me ‘that look’ again – I hate morning traffic.
• 09:32 – 17:30: Work

– Busy day today, customers not being completely moronic yet, which is nice.

– It’s someone’s birthday and I see people walking around with slices of cake. The half-eaten apple on my desk isn’t feeling as tasty now.

– Dorine sitting next to me is chewing loudly again whilst eating her snacks – rage building.

– Ate slice of cake… it was from one of the fancier supermarkets and I didn’t want to be rude.

– Martin who sits on the other side of me keeps engaging me in pleasant conversation – Feeling easily distracted.

– Know that I haven’t hit my targets again today… shit!

• 17:36 – 18:05: Drives home from the office – May hate evening traffic even more than the mornings.
• 18:10 – 19:10 – Watched television whilst sitting with my laptop – Brain had an hours holiday.
• 19:30 – Ready to see a friend that I haven’t hung out with for a while – Excited.
• 21:00 – Had a great time with the friend, shot the breeze for ages. He has a new girlfriend which is nice – Food was on the more extreme end of healthy, bloody tasty but anticipating feeling like a slug later.
• 00:00 – Going to bed – Tired as hell again – feeling a little anxious about a meeting at work tomorrow that I need to prepare for – Feel like a slug from the food earlier.

Fin.

 

Now if you are able to capture that amount of information in a day then you now have a whole load of new information that you can work with about a typical day in your life. You can use this information to populate your town as Mayor more accurately, placing emotions, feelings, and actions in the different buildings in your districts.

 

If you would like extra brownie points, you can plot this information onto an Excel spreadsheet with the amount of time you spend doing things in the day. This will be useful down the road when tracking your progress and seeing positive changes in your town.

Try this for a day. Give it a go and see if it reveals some things about yourself. There are many different types of audits that we will surely go into more details in the future but this is a nice one to get your grey matter warmed up and thinking.

 

I hope that you have a great rest of day, and if no one else says it, just remember that I think you’re great!

Yours sincerely,

Ryan Rose-Blanc

Rose-Blanc Town management