HOW TO BE EFFECTIVE AT WORK AND HOME
We live really near a stony beach, so buckets and spades become more about stone removal and reconstruction than sandcastles. When it’s time to leave, my kids always want to take their stone collection with them. Of course, all you fellow intelligent people will do what I do, place the massive stones in first and then the smaller ones at the end. That way they all fit.
Everyone I’m speaking to seems to be so busy and overloaded. There are to-do lists as long as your arms and thoughts coming in and out of our minds as fast as lightning.
Rider Carroll, creator of The Bullet Journal says "being busy is often code for being functionally overwhelmed".
How do we extract feeling overwhelmed from a full modern life? How do we function efficiently and effectively as we navigate our never-ending lists?
One of my passions that aids in living a productive life is to file and organise life so that it works efficiently and effectively for you. Living in this digital modern world with its quickened pace of life, not to mention when you throw in family, covid, hobbies, exercise, even mindfulness exercises and so much more, it can feel that we are on a hamster wheel on the road to nowhere. Life is taking us, we are not taking life.
How are we not taught, trained or prepared for this pace? It amazes me that at school we were never taught how to organise our time, practise our focus or learn methods for intention and prioritising.
If you’re still with me, here we go... try this out today…
Start a new sheet of paper in your notebook. Write down everything you have to do, everything you’re thinking of doing in the near future from home life to work life and let this be the list you work from. Get everything out of your head and onto paper. Notebook expert Ryder Carroll says, “Writing things down allows us to capture our thoughts and examine them in the light of day. By externalising our thoughts, we begin to declutter our minds.”
From home-schooling issues, money worries and job issues, to tasks at work such as 'get information from the sales team', 'identify top leads', 'motivate team sales' and 'email budget to X'... put it on the list in a way that makes it a project to address, e.g.:
· Think of things to make kids burn off more energy when home-schooling
· Come up with 3 new ways to create revenue streams
· Research books/blogs on how to re-activate motivation in job
· Contact sales team re. marketing
· Who are the top leads?
· Call X to get advice for motivating team
· Email budget to X
Getting it out of the head and onto paper gets it out of the dark fog and into the clear light. As I coach people at the moment, I’m struck by how often people are rubbing their forehead as they talk, it’s as though they are trying to massage the overload stuck inside.
The simple act of having written it down may solve the feeling of being overwhelmed in and of itself. This may seem so simple, and indeed it is. But it’s far from simplistic. Our brains can only create and work well when they are relaxed and out of a frantic state. Releasing as much noise as possible from inside our head and onto paper aids that relaxation process.
We can then attend creatively and productively to the most important things without feeling like our head is spaghetti junction. It is then that we can look for the most important stones to focus on first - the things that are most important, most impactful, most productive - in order to then add the smaller stones - less urgent, less impactful tasks - that can slot in and fit easily or even be ignored.
If we carry on with it all in our head, it’s akin to our computer’s RAM being full. My Mac is about 7 years old and every few hours I have to click ‘free-up' in the memory, which takes about 40 seconds in order for it to function efficiently. Same with us, let's ‘free-up' our RAM, our brainpower, and put stuff on the list so that we can be as creative, resourceful and impactful as our families and organisations need us to be.
To discuss this further, do reach out to me at info@dollywaddell.com