Atina Diffley's Blog: What Is A Farm? A Synthesis of the Land, People, and Business.

This Assessment measures your level of satisfaction and range of expression in nine life areas: work, fun, finances, physical environment, personal growth, health and well being, friends, family, and significant others. As you work through the assessment  you will likely identify areas where you are satisfied and other areas where you want to focus attention and  improve your level of satisfaction.

Download

The post Life Assessment Wheel appeared first on Atina Diffley.

Each of us has Personal Needs—beyond the basic needs of food and shelter—that must be met to be our best, to thrive. It is critical to meet these needs through positive activities and behaviors. When we don’t, we unconsciously find a way to meet them—often through behaviors that are ineffective or conflict with living a fulfilling life and having healthy relationships.

This document will walk you through understanding what your most important personal needs are and create a plan to meet them proactively.

Download

The post Plan Ahead to Meet Your Personal Needs appeared first on Atina Diffley.

This document provides a process for farms to:

• Define Roles and Responsibilities: Create a clear understanding of the roles, responsibilities, and expectations of the individuals that are involved with your farm business.

• Define Decision-Making Responsibilities: Establish a clear understanding of who is responsible for which decisions.

• Create Information Sharing Systems: Establish what information needs to be shared for the individuals to accomplish their responsibilities in a timely and efficient manner, and what system(s) will be used.

Download

The post Roles and Responsibilities: “Who” Is Responsible For “What.” appeared first on Atina Diffley.

A criteria screen is a decision-making tool to evaluate strategies with criteria that reflect our needs and values, especially for big decisions that have a long term impact or affect multiple people. It:

• Provides a process to include and understand the values and needs of all of the stakeholders in a decision.

• Stimulates potential strategy ideas that are outside of our normal brain maps and routines.

• Guides evaluation of potential strategies as to how well they accomplish our Quality of Life criteria.

• Helps us decide what matters most. We might not be able to meet all of our criteria to a maximum level.

Download

The post Criteria Screen appeared first on Atina Diffley.

A “holistic goal” is a three-part goal from a school of thought called Holistic Management. It describes:

1. Quality of Life: What we really want our lives to be.

2. Forms of Production: What we must commit to in order to produce the quality of life we want.

3. Resource Base: Our ideal farm– the future resource base the forms of production depend on.

The three parts are all critical to a comprehensive holistic goal that can guide our decisions and actions toward the lives we want. Management that fulfills the obligations we have to ourselves, our families, our environment, and our communities can only succeed in the context of a journey toward a holistic goal. Without the broad base of a holistic goal, we may well accomplish a goal we’ve stated, but with unintended consequences.

Download

The post Create A Holistic Goal appeared first on Atina Diffley.

A process of continuous improvement that addresses the weakest link for your farm is a critical practice to accomplishing your goals and financial viability.

“One, and only one, weakest link accounts for the strength of the entire chain, regardless of how strong other links might be. To strengthen a chain one must always attend first to the weakest link. Other links, no matter how frail they appear, are essentially non-problems until the weakest link is first fixed.” – Allan Savory, Jody Butterfield, Holistic Management

Download

The post Weakest Link appeared first on Atina Diffley.

Have you ever been to a meeting where people say they will do certain things, and the next time, and the next time, they are still undone?

Or plan to do something only to find you don’t have the resources you need, or an unanticipated challenge presents itself?

Or maybe you need a system to implement, track, and evaluate progress.

An Action Plan can help make it happen!

Download

The post Action Plan appeared first on Atina Diffley.

On a farm there is always more to do than time to do it. Time management skills are critical to accomplish our goals.

This document will help you prioritize based on urgency and importance and to schedule tasks to minimize crisis-based management.

Download

The post Time Management and The Eisenhower Box appeared first on Atina Diffley.

1. FS Introduction

2. Training & Health & Hygiene

3. Land Use 2

4. Post Harvest

5. Water, BSA, Animals copy

6. Records and Traceability

On a farm there is always more to do than time to do it. Time management skills and systems are crucial for prioritizing daily, weekly, and monthly tasks, delegation decisions, annual planning, economic viability, meeting market demands, and accomplishing a healthy personal life.

Put simply, effective time management is a fundamental and crucial component of farm and personal success.

A first step to effective time management is to categorize the tasks to be done based on how urgent and how important they truly are.

Urgent Actions: Things that you feel you need to react to now or very soon.

Important Actions: Things that contribute to your long-term mission, values, and goals.

Some things are urgent and important, such as a broken fence and cows out. They can pull us away from the important work at hand. Imagine you have to stop planting to deal with the cows. Then it rains, and you didn’t have the planting finished. Like a line of dominos, other areas of farm work and our personal lives fall.

Other things may feel urgent but might not be important—such as the phone ringing—and distract us from tasks that are important.

The Eisenhower Box is a useful tool to for taking action and organizing your time. The format breaks tasks into 1 of 4 categories based on urgency and importance. Separating these is simple enough to do once. Doing it continually can be challenging. The box provides a framework to do it consistently. Consistency is key to success.

There are many ways to use the Eisenhower box. It can be used for planning on a daily, weekly, monthly, or annual basis, or record keeping and analysis. A few ways to consider are:

Make your work plans and to-do-lists in it. Doing so will hold you to prioritizing tasks effectively. It will also develop prioritization habits and analysis skills. Keep blank copies where you do your daily planning: at your desk, on your clipboard, etc. A template is provided in this document.
Record and analyze. As you go through the busy season, capture farm activities in the category that you want them to happen in the future. For example, if you find yourself writing a CSA newsletter at midnight the night before distribution in the heat of harvest, you might note in the important and not urgent box that next year you will create CSA newsletters in January, and only finalize them with a bit of current news during the busy season. After recording activities for a period of time, you will be able to create an annual work plan. It can be close to impossible to make system changes on a farm during the busy season. It’s important to capture what needs improvement so you can attend to it later when you have time. Without recording, things are often forgotten and the same inefficient process is repeated again, year after year.

Analyze the Delete box. Items that fall into the not important & not urgent box may just be old habits to be gotten rid of, however they might be serving a personal need that is not readily apparent. Is there a reason you do these things? Do they provide down time? Connection, or some other personal need? You may be better served recognizing the personal need and finding a more effective way to meet it.Eisenhower Box Download Download this article and a blank template for your personal and business use.

© 2017 Atina Diffley

Comments focused on improving this resource, and requests to reproduce it for educational purposes can be sent to atina@organicfarmingworks.com