The Daily Check-in is an incredibly simple tool to help you, and your schedule, stay in line with your priorities. Establish a calm, quiet time during your morning routine (I suggest having pen and paper within reach). Get in touch with your personal goals and, as vividly as possible, imagine them completed, or in full expression. If inspired, write down thoughts that come to mind. Give yourself ten to fifteen minutes for this. Only then, shift gears and plan your schedule for the day.

(This article originally appeared in The Weekly Simplifier #17.)

By Shawn Tuttle

Do you want to help your clients and customers? Silly question (I hope!) Do you do your best for each job? Do you put your heart and integrity on the line for every single client? Do you ever find that your best intentions are sidetracked by unexpected events? The question I’m getting at is really:

Have you mastered the dance between perfection and life?

In the “perfect” (read: unrealistic) world free of interruptions, computer glitches, and just plain bad days, deadlines are easily met and deliverables are of the highest quality. You get to share your gifts and talents with the world through your work, which is hopefully, your passion.

In the real world, life happens—a fantastic dance—all of your trial and errors, birthday celebrations, burnt lattes, stubbed toes, employee difficulties, invoicing, beach playing, mini-dramas, meetings, congested traffic, dry cleaning, misplaced paperwork—and oh, did I mention client work?

The dance between perfection and life is a gentle tension between remaining true to your heart in producing your “art” and achieving completion in your interactions with others.

Perfection

I believe everyone has a unique contribution to make to the world. Whether you call yourself an “artist” or not, the creations that come straight from your heart are your art.

The French artist Paul Cezanne took this extremely seriously: “With each touch I risk my life,” he said. It reveals the intensity with which he produced his art. An extreme for sure, but when I first heard this I was inspired. He shared his passion with as much integrity as he was able. He mastered the delivery of his art and he made a huge impact on the western world.

The question then becomes, for whom is the end result? In other words, who is your audience? As soon as an audience is in
place, conveying your idea to them becomes potentially hazardous to your art. Connection with your client or potential client takes great import. In the business world, your work’s impact increases as your audience grows.

Art and Perfection in the context of Life

Completed projects are good in that they allow for a sense of accomplishment and new beginnings. Fine and dandy…and easier to say when not feeling stressed by an incomplete project. Many people say they work well and even thrive under pressure. Most, however, don’t relish the stress felt when an impending deadline looms large and ugly on the horizon. The experience and fallout of stress is harmful to you and those around you.

And that’s just your part of the equation. What about interacting with clients?

Understanding and anticipating your client’s wishes are a part of the business production. Success is measured by the level of your client’s engagement in, or acceptance of, your work. Managing the “mis-” problems—misjudging, misunderstanding, mistakes, and miscommunication—can transform your attitude from “fresh start” to survival mode overnight. Not the best environment for producing your art; rather it is quite the environment for work to become work.

With all of the time pressures, re-do’s, and trial and error encountered traveling the road of clients & customers, why do we persist? Really now! We need more than $ to make it worth our while!

The answer goes straight to the heart of Service:

You receive the gift of creating your art in the context of assisting another.

I recently heard a professional author at a writers’ conference share some of his tips and experiences. He emphasized the point of being aware of who his audience will be for any given piece. Writing for different magazines, his treatment of the same subject can result in very different articles.

He also repeated a strong conviction that led me to believe that part of his art actually has nothing to do with writing. He encouraged his non-fiction writing listeners to always approach their interview subjects with humility and diplomacy. He took pride and delight in the fact that he had positive relations with all of his own former interview subjects. In the process of writing about them, he honored them. Now that is a beautiful dance of art and life!

One could say that art is life and life is art, and I wouldn’t argue with them. A more curious inquisition reveals a fascinating dance of understanding yourself and your relationships with others.

I always found the science experiment conducted “in a vacuum” to be odd. Who lives in a vacuum? Every single action we make does, in fact, have impact on all other living beings—and the actions of others impact us. The byproduct blossoming from your journey of serving your clients and serving yourself is that you are serving your world.

—
Shawn Tuttle is founder of Project Simplify

(This article originally appeared in The Weekly Simplifier #16.)

By Lance Brown

Recently, a local tree offered me the opportunity to give the car-free lifestyle a try for a little while. Before I knew it (and with a screech of tires), I had accepted, and it wasn’t long after that I was rolling my bicycle out from the basement area, and wondering if I could make it work as my only form of transportation for a while.

It’s been a couple of months since then, and my adventures in biking for groceries have taught me a lot about the value of planning, especially when resources are limited. And really, aren’t everyone’s resources limited? Though you may not be restricted to a 50-pounds-per-outing maximum like me, it still makes sense to think about efficiency, and how to make best use of your (limited) resources.

Riding a bike into town for all of my supplies has put a lot of things we take for granted into stark perspective for me. Things like priorities, planning, and knowing my limits, to name a few.

First, some background. I live way out in the country, at the end of a dirt and gravel road. The nearest supermarket is 20-25 minutes away by car. A normal round trip on my bike is about 20 miles, approximately half of which is uphill. A trip into town now takes between 2-1/2 hours and 4 hours, depending on how many places I go. And after about 15 to 18 trips like this, they still tire me out pretty well. So the impact reaches further than the trip itself.

The lesson there is simple: simplify, or else. I can only do so many of these trips, so often. If I’m doing the bike thing, that’s just how it is. So it’s essentials only, for the most part. Each trip has a limited carrying capacity, and so far, competition for space in each trip has been fierce. Groceries and errands start lining up for the next trip immediately after the last one, and I have to be the strict arbiter of priorities—deciding, within fairly rigid limitations, which items are really essential, and which can be done without.

Which isn’t to say I’m torturing myself with deprivation—I’m not. I’ve hardly gone without ice cream at all during this adventure, for example. But I have had to think hard about just about everything that gets included in a journey into town. Does it involve extra travel? Are there hills? How much does it weigh? How big is it? Will I have to rush home with it?

All these questions matter quite a lot when you’re biking far for supplies. But even if you aren’t having to measure your groceries by the pound, evaluating the real cost of your choices—of including certain things in your life or your planning—is important all the time. Your time and resources are limited too. Maybe not limited to the size of a large duffel bag and 10 miles each way, but still…

Here are some resource management lessons I’ve been learning during my adventures in biking for groceries:

Saying No

In accepting this effort to try out forced simplification via bicycling, I was also accepting the notion of saying “no” to a lot of things in my life, at least for a while. It’s not as negative as it sounds, though. In contrast, it has helped me to identify and concentrate on what’s essential to me—a key step in living a simpler, more focused life. When I do rejoin the ranks of the auto-driving public, it will be a lot easier to notice that which is wasteful and/or unnecessary for me. Plus, it will do my clutter load some good to have one summer where I don’t “brake for yard sales” (and “Free” signs) every few days. :-)

Planning Matters

Planning is everything in my situation. Poor planning can mean hours added on to a trip, or even being stranded and having to walk home with an unwalkable load. Before I head out for a trip into town, I know exactly where I intend to go, in what order, and what I will do or get when I get there. I double-check all my choices and assumptions to make sure I’m not missing something, and if there are any variables in play, I come up with a workable backup plan. All this happens before my foot hits pedal one. Once I do head out, the details of the agenda are set, and at least that one part of my trip is easy and stress-free. Which is good, because I’ve got other things to worry about on these trips—like not getting run off the road, and keeping sweat out of my eyes, for example. And hills…

Watch Out For Hills

It’s amazing how much we take hills for granted when we’re in a car. Now that I’m biking, “How bad are the hills?” is my first question when considering a new destination. And if you think of hills metaphorically, that’s an important question to consider when taking on projects or making commitments. Every commitment carries with it a series of obligations—some obvious, some not—and it’s in your best interest to make an honest evaluation of those things before you jump into a given endeavor. Metaphorical hills can be even more exhausting than literal ones (and you don’t even get the bonus of having firmer legs!)

Deprivation = focus

The bottom line is that periods of deprivation or limited resources can teach us a lot about how to make the most of what we do have, in order to do what we really need to be doing. This is one of the major tenets of leading a more simplified life, and also an extremely important part of doing business as effectively as possible. And while going bike-only for the summer has been rough (and really, really sweaty), it has been enlightening too.

When actor Jamie Foxx was filming his amazing performance as Ray Charles for the movie Ray, he wore uncomfortable prosthetic contact lenses which rendered him completely blind. He kept them on all day (not just when on-camera) so that he could get the best understanding possible of what Ray’s perspective was like. Before long, Foxx’s hearing became ultra-sensitive, as he began to develop some of the strengths that blind people develop to make up for their lost sight. Foxx’s voluntary deprivation helped him better appreciate the limited (but still very powerful) perspective of the musical genius he was imitating—and it won him a much-deserved Oscar award for his performance. And Ray Charles himself, and his amazing career, is a testament to the fact that even with limited resources, your ability to make the most of what you do have is virtually unlimited—with the right perspective.

Just don’t try biking for groceries and the blinding contact lenses at the same time, OK?

—
Lance Brown is Co-Editor of The Weekly Simplifier.

Do you function better at night? Are your mornings compacted and rushed? Get
your day rolling more easily by making use of the night before.

The following are some ideas of things that can be done… What else can you get
in the habit of doing the night before?

• Pack lunches
• Pick out your and your kid’s outfits
• Unload the dishwasher in the evening so that you have a place to put dirty
  dishes in the morning
• Pack up your kid’s schoolbag and your bag/briefcase
• Set the breakfast table
• {For home offices} De-clutter your desk and set it up to welcome you in
  the morning!

(This article originally appeared in The Weekly Simplifier #13.)

By Shawn Tuttle

In a special “multimedia” article, we’d like to share this illustration of some of the key elements of an organized life. If you work to abide by these main themes in your life, you will de facto become more organized! The mini-elements provide some ways to make the bigger elements more bearable and easier to manage. Beneath the diagram we’ve included some notes of clarification, and provided links to other Project Simplify resources that are available on these topics.

Click here for a larger version of the diagram as an image file.
Click here for a larger version as a PDF file.

Main Elements:

Visualize priorities
How do you want to feel going through your day? How do you want to react in situations? How do you as your “best” self feel? What do you want your space to look like? Take a few moments to visualize this. By visualize I mean: relax, paint a visual image representing your ideal, explore what it feels like, make it a part of you. Why is this powerful? Being in touch with your best self, and knowing what your goals are provide the “compass” to navigating the unexpected terrain of life with meaningful results. A great time to do this regularly is during Planning Time (see below). It also helps with scheduling.

Be Pro-active
Do what you planned, when you planned to do it. It won’t get done by itself! Tip for pro-active clutter busting: Never set something down to “take care of later”. When you have something in your hand, only put it down where it is supposed to go.

Planning Time
Planning Time has come up twice in recent Project Simplify articles: “Planning Time vs. Doing Time” introduces the concept, and “Plan to Prevent Overwhelm” digs deeper into the benefits of making effective use of planning.

A place for everything
The full organizers adage: “A place for everything and everything in its place.” Clutter often is the result of not knowing where to put something and not wanting to deal with finding a place for it. Evaluate what is out of place, (be pro-active!) take a moment to determine where the best home for that item is.

Scheduling
Such a wonderful pro-active tool! How to make sure family outings happen? Schedule them in! Make it a habit to work backwards to determine when you need to leave in order to get to an appointment 15 minutes early (yes, 15 minutes early! See Time Realism below). Having people over on Friday? Work backwards to see how you can spread out preparations over a several day period. After you’ve broken a big project into sprints (see Small Steps below), work backwards, to sprinkle these sprints into your schedule.

Mini-elements:

Small Steps
Break big projects into small steps. Do super short sprints rather than marathons. Marathons are too easy to put off, and once you get going, too easy to get distracted from. During your sprint, establish a time limit and mono-task, put on blinders!

Mono-task
Mono-tasking is the opposite of multi-tasking, and was the focus of The Weekly Simplifier # 9. Word on the street (and in more and more studies) is that multi-tasking is not as great as we’ve been led to believe. You may get more done if you try mono-tasking. Read more here.

Time Realism
The average person schedules 18 hours of appointments and tasks into a 12 hour day. Some people can realistically guess how long a task will take, but then completely disregard preparation and clean-up times. Appointments: Sure it only takes 15 minutes to get there, but what about the time it takes to load the car, take a final “potty” run, get gas, and really, who budgets time for parking? (Time realists, that’s who!)

Bio-rhythms
Scheduling with your bio-rhythms means doing the right activities at the right time for you. It was dealt with in greater length in TWS #5 as our Tip of the Week, and it’s now a blog entry of its own in our Time Management section.

—

Shawn Tuttle is founder of Project Simplify.