I have felt many times like the Headless Fly so I felt the urge to write about this as an effort to stop being it.
When we don’t have a plan we are like a headless fly. This is true both for small things like tasks for the day and big things like starting your own company, or organizing an event. Flies without heads fly back and forth until they hit the wall and react by flying to another direction until they hit another wall. To put it in human terms we can run around like crazy, which creates the delusion of being super busy. And at the end of the day we have done nothing, nada, zero, zilch! Have you felt like that at the end of the day? And yes, sometimes your head may hurt from that mindless reactive bouncing around.
The negative key word here is reactive. If we don’t have a plan (however small it is) we react to whatever comes as it becomes our plan for the minute or the hour. This is not productive and at best we will be surviving by doing management by crisis. We may still advance dealing with matters this way, but reactivity is slow paced and takes a lot more energy than being proactive. Proactive in this case is willingly writing your plan (for the day, the event, the company).
We must put the effort of putting a plan together first. Every single day. We can just sit down at the beginning of the day or the night before for 2 minutes (2 minutes and no more!) and scribble a few items on a postit. These must be items that we consider important and we must be physically capable of doing all of them day. Don’t plan more than you are capable of doing. Two minutes and the plan is done!
You don’t have to use postits; they just happen to be what works for me at this point. You can use your favorite trusted system, which can be outlook or something else. Just write it down and have it out of your mind. This will make you feel much less stressed as you won’t have to constantly remember this and that and a thousand other things. If the system you use is trusted you will notice your plan during the day and you will magically stop worrying that you may forget something. You will also loose the guilty feeling created by the bunch of things constantly screaming at once from your sub-consciousness “get us done!!!!” They will be tamed down on the postit.
Having a few things written down subconsciously makes them your priorities for the day. No matter how reactive your nature is, it is likely that you will better manage to resist not doing the other “urgent” things that pop up during the day. The only exception may be if an alligator attacks you at the office or in your living room. Then you will have to definitely make fighting it your immediate priority ;-).
Have the plan? Now let’s get these things done. If you put more things that you are capable of doing then you may not be able to finish them all. So, again, make sure you get only the ones you are physically able to do for that day. Then set your mind in the morning that you want to do these things. If you don’t want to do them, well, maybe they are not as important as you thought or you are very good at making excuses. Aren’t we all? Remember YOU put these items in your plan, which means that YOU want to do them for YOURSELF. That’s what’s called being your own boss.
This same mini system can work for the larger time span, such as if you are starting your own company. Sit down and do that plan and don’t rely on your brain to remember everything. Maybe you should use a system better than a postit unless you want to have your house interior in Pale Peach, which I heard was not fashionable this year. But it all boils down to putting the effort of planning and doing. We just have to write the plan and then do it – hour by hour or day by day. Let’s put that head on our shoulders.
I am starting to finally understand what my mom has been saying forever: “Foolish people try to remember everything; smart people write things down.”
Nothing else will save us form being the Headless Fly unless we are wizards, have enough money to hire a personal manager, or have the luck of bouncing off the wall at just the correct angle every time to keep us going forward. But even if we are that lucky, there is still the possibility that the next bounce will be off of Life’s fly swatter and not the wall.
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