You look around to see if anyone just happened to have a recording device pointed in your direction because that was just too sweet…

I had one of those conversations today while having coffee with a lovely woman who is growing her social media assistance business here in our tiny town of Nevada City.

Because conversations with me tend to come round to the idea of simplifying (go figure!) we started talking about her workflow.

She said she was getting frazzled working for a bunch of different clients simultaneously.

Due to the nature of social media and the way her brain works, she knows that designating, for example, one hour to this client and then another hour to that client just isn’t practical. She’s bouncing all over the place, following threads of ideas and links to new things—which is great—but she’s finding it isn’t mentally sustainable.

I explained how each type of activity utilizes a different set of operating instructions. We run through them so fast and so automatically that we don’t even realize it.

When you pick up your cappuccino you’re running instructions on how to bring it to your mouth without spilling, assess whether the temperature is OK, and then set it back on the saucer. Not something we think about blow by blow, but it happens nonetheless.

Mono-tasking is what we typically call having only one set of operating instructions running. When you continue until you finish that one list of instructions, you get the delicious pleasure of completion satisfaction.

When you have several sets of instructions running—say you start one list, get part way through it, then open up another list and then another, even though you only literally work on one thing at a time, for example a tweet for client X or a Facebook post for client Q, you still have all those other unfinished lists open.

Your mind is expending energy to maintain them because they haven’t been completed or closed.

The more you have open, the more likely you are to hit frazzle mode. At what point does this happen? Depends. Everyone’s threshold is different, and you can mix different types of activities to varying levels of success.

Compounding her frazzling tendency, she’s been on an hourly model. This leads to an unsettled mental spin of “How do I track time when I’m constantly jumping around” and “It’s-Never-Done”—the combination of which leads to, most likely, a bunch of un-billed time and super long hours.

So how can she reframe her work to get more peace and completion (like you get mono-tasking) while still playing to the reality of social media jumping around for multiple clients?

There are (at least) a few things that she can experiment with:

1. By paying attention to when she starts getting frazzled, she can see where tinkering would be helpful. For example, are too many or too disparate operating instructions running?
2. Transition from an hourly model to a package or retainer model.
3. Define what the specific and realistic goals are for each client each day, aka Know When You’re Done!
4. Instead of grouping by Client, group by social media venue, or even activity within a venue. For example, she could focus on responding to others’ tweets OR posting clients’ tweets (and not both at the same time).

After writing that last sentence, I see that if you aren’t a Twitter person, you’ll have no idea what that means. The point is to narrow down the scope of what you’re working on while maintaining the flexibility and spontaneity demanded by the task and/or your attention span.

Ok, let’s wrap ‘er up. What I particularly want you to take from this is the knowledge that you can make changes in your workflow that point you toward the benefits of mono-tasking without shunning multi-tasking.

We’re not living in a dualistic mono-multi world, no siree, there are many m’s in between. It’s our challenge to find them!

Let it be easy.

What about getting the ingredients, mixing it up, preheating the oven, letting them bake, giving some time to cool, and then cutting them up and arranging them on a serving plate? (Beh, who needs a serving plate? I’ll just throw the whole pan to those demanding chocoholics.)

It’s easy to look at someone else’s work and wonder how in the world they did it (talking more complicated than brownies here). Why is it also so easy to forget that any piece of work is the result of a series of steps–usually repeatable ones at that?

For example, when writing a column or article, my process goes something like this:
1st session: brainstorm (pen & paper)
2nd session: 1st draft on computer
3rd session: take pass #1 to tighten it up
4th session: take pass #2 to smooth it out
5th session: (hopefully) wrap it up and send it off.

It’s best if these all happen on subsequent days, or at least during different work sessions. Gives my mind a chance to let stuff settle.

Time also allows a fresh perspective. Regaining objectivity makes it easier to drop the irrelevant points and more easily see what needs elaboration.

Besides, breaking it up makes the process feel infinitely easier. When pushing myself to combine sessions, it just feels hard. I don’t work well that way and who needs hard?

Doesn’t matter if you aren’t writing articles. I’ll bet you have something that you do regularly that would be much easier if you identified the steps that you go through. Pay attention to how your work flows best and respect the process. Peace.

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Photo credits:
Brownies in a box by JuditK

Why do you spend as much time as you do on email?

For some time now I’ve been cutting way back on the amount of time that I spend doing email.

• I’ve set up rules for most of my mailing lists.
• I spend a couple of hours on important projects in the morning before opening my email.
• I take a day off a week from even opening the program.
• I do my best to resist any browsing (Zap or get out!)

What I haven’t done is write a book about it like John Freeman did: The Tyranny of E-mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox.

Nor have I written a nice, clear and concise blog post of 10 suggestions about that book like Robert Middleton did.

But they did. Cool. Thanks guys.

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Photo credits:
Monster #2 by autumn_bliss

Writing out a list for the day and crossing things off, that’s not so bad.

The question that follows though, must be answered truthfully:
- Does that list reflect your priorities?
- OR is it reflective of the critical issues going on in your life right now?

If you take the time to do a list, my guess is that it’s some of both.

Now, then.

IF you have a lot on your plate,
AND you don’t want important tasks falling through the cracks,
then relying on your head to manage all your tasks is just plain crazy making (which is essentially what daily list making does).

A task manager of some sort is a must. As Gina Trapani (of LifeHacker.com) points out in her book, 88 Tech Tricks to Turbocharge Your Day, your system must offer three categorical trackers:

• projects
• contexts
• priorities

Reality check: choosing a system is just the beginning of the story.

Almost a year ago, I recommended OmniFocus (it’s a Task manager for Mac) to a client. She bought it.

I helped her get it set up based on what I knew about her work, projects, and contexts. Since it was a new concept for her, she mostly deferred to what I suggested.

Even though I knew quite a bit about her work, asked questions that came to mind, and finished with the strong encouragement to change it around as she saw fit, they way it was set up did not engage her.

Months went by and she used it half-heartedly. After a while, I was beginning to think that it was a lost cause.

Until a couple of weeks ago.

All of a sudden, she took ownership of the thing. “This project list isn’t useful for me. What would work is if it was organized like this XXX and then with sub-projects like this.”

It was as if she finally realized that no matter how much she wanted to see me as the all-knowing expert, her thought process must be reflected in the system and that she was the best person to guide that part of it.

I jumped in the program right then and there and began rearranging and renaming based on her thoughts.

Then we went through every ToDo already in there and moved them to their newly appropriate places.

It was as if a brand new program had been installed. With her active participation at this level, we were able to customize it in such a way that she was finally willing to engage with it 100%.

It isn’t enough to:

• pick a system,
• install it, and
• learn how to use it.

Make it YOURS.

• How can it reflect the way that you think?
• How can it fill in to support you in your areas of weakness?
• How can it be used to fit in with your patterns?

Go get ‘em Tiger!

A: Pick one of the following three tips.

You’ll notice that the common theme of these is focusing in on what’s important. Scattered thoughts short-circuit the brain. Funneled energy (i.e. focus) gets things done.

1. Stop answering your phone every time it rings.
   Rather than be on-call for every person who wants to connect with you for whatever reason, silence the ringer if you are in the middle of a project or another specific activity.
2. Do the most important thing on your ToDo list.The chatterbrain gremlins love hunting and pecking through your ToDo list. Just say NO!
   • Identify the most important item.
   • Clarify that it is, in fact, doable (i.e. clearly defined and of appropriate size). Adjust if not.
   • Put on blinders, do the thing, check it off.
   • Repeat.
3. Know what the most important project on your plate is and do one thing to advance it.
   All tasks are not created equal. Psychically, completing a single task toward the Important Project feels exponentially better than doing 15 random, not-real-important tasks. In fact, you might even feel worse after the 15 if there’s a lingering feeling that you are procrastinating the Important one.

If you have these three dialed in (Yay, Natural Professional!) what other distractions can you eliminate or minimize in order to train your attention on your important projects?

I had a conversation with my Naturopathic Doctor who informed me yesterday that I’ve got a little something that needs to be taken care of.

Afterwards, S.O. Mark, in his ever gentle way suggested that maybe I’m driving myself a little too hard these days.

This morning, this little gem was sitting in my inbox from Seth Godin‘s blog:
N-1

[It's a bounce off of Fred Wilson's musings of continuing possibilities N+1.]

Reading Seth’s short piece encouraged me to think about the other fun and creative projects that aren’t happening when I do just-one-more-thing at the computer.

(Like write a blog post when it’s time to hit the Farmers Market?? Hmmm, tough I tell ya.)

In some instances this is a good thing as it leads to grounding the (big picture) principles in (specific) practical application.

Other times, like when I’m working on clarifying an outline, diving into the particulars results in me about ten feet down a rabbit hole wondering where the sun went. Not helpful.

With the intention of not getting lost in a maze of detail, I put the simplification rule #19 clarify your intention to use.

As I sat down to work on an outline, I clarified that this activity called for a bird’s eye view perspective and that details weren’t appropriate. Sure enough, it worked!

So if you find yourself meandering through a project, occasionally getting lost, and slowly getting frustrated that you don’t seem to be making progress, get clear on your intention for a specific step and stick with it!

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Photo credit:
A vista de pájaro – A bird´s eye view by Rob Unreall

She’s a happy kid and has an amazingly good life for a 7-week old—though life as she knew it has just ended—Dad’s paternity leave just ended and back to work he goes.

I went down to help my sister transition to being the daytime-only parent.

How single parents manage is beyond my comprehension. Seems like 3–4 adults would actually be a good number. Everyone would get plenty of sleep, the kid would get plenty of attention from well-rested care-takers, and each adult would be able to do their own stuff as well.

That’s my little dream world, anyways. Since that’s not how our families are set up, my sister will figure out how to make it work like millions of women before her.

There’s a moral to the story: get organized and get help.

At a café one afternoon, we worked on her schedule. I started by asking her to list all the things that she foresees happening or needing to happen during a one week period. This included everything from

• getting herself ready for the day
• feeding/changing/activity times
• laundry
• kitchen activities, daily pick up
• handling email, mail, bills
• appointments

Then we placed the feeding/changing/activity time bands across the weekly schedule (since this is pretty much the defining responsibility of each day).

This provided enough structure to place everything else relative to feeding times. (except for the appointments—parent group gatherings, story time at the library, and Diaper Days at the movies**)

This makes for a flexible relative schedule rather than a time-specific schedule that would be close to impossible to keep (being on baby-time and all).

Here’s how it starts: Dad does the feeding around 7:30/8am, right before going to work. Right before he starts, he let’s my sister (aka Mom) know. Since the baby’s been pretty regular about a 2-hour feeding schedule, my sister knows she has about 2 hours until show time.

We figured out that her personal prep time and breakfast is about 45 minutes, and prepping the bottles for the day takes about 20 minutes and unloading the dishwasher takes about 10.

So once she gets that wake up call, she knows she has about 15 minutes to get out of bed, and begin that first morning routine.

When she gets these things done before that first feeding, she feels “on it” instead of like she’s perpetually playing catch-up.

We proceeded to put all the other activities on the schedule, relative to feeding times.

Most of the stuff on the schedule is bare minimum. Once she gets all this dialed in with good habits, then she’ll know when she can add other things like exercise, play dates, self time etc.

A couple of things that might provide food for thought for someone working on improving their own scheduling:
1. Set a boundary time before which nothing is scheduled. This means that my sister won’t schedule anything before 11am (until she feels comfortable with everything happening). We arrived at this by knowing:

• that she sets up the rest of her day before the first feeding, and
• how much time she wants to get herself ready
• how much time it takes to feed-change-pump

2. Breaking down the laundry process. A load of laundry gets

• started before bed time (lol, as if there were such a thing as “bed time” for a nursing mom),
• transferred to the drier after a night time feeding,
• folded and put away after first daytime feeding the next morning.

(I.e. we broke it up into chunks and took it all the way through to completion.)

She’s already had positive results with her new schedule. Obviously she’ll adjust as needed—planning on paper doesn’t always jive with real life (gasp!) In any case, she knows she works well with this kind of structure so I’ve full faith that she’ll get it figured out!

And if not… well, she knows who to call =)

Allow time in your schedule to hold space for your well-being. Your wise-self knows approx how much.

The Tip Explained
Have you ever thought that your schedule looked doable, yet your experience left you feeling rushed and bewildered about where all the time went?

It’s easy to look at availability in terms of blocked out vs. not blocked out sections on your calendar. This is only one part of your schedule.

There’s another aspect to designing your schedule that often falls under the radar: “holding space”. By this I mean acknowledging that commitments and unexpected situations take time and energy, a lot of which is not schedulable. Your well-being benefits—no, it requires—space to make sense of the world you are experiencing.

Often times, we aren’t even aware of the additional strain on ourselves—it just gets written off as “I’m tired today” or “I feel drained” seemingly for no reason. Maybe there is a reason!

For example: Think of the last time you started a new position. Even though your schedule may have claimed 10 hours for the week, it likely felt like a whole lot more. Did you feel tired or drained? This was your psyche getting accustomed to your new role.

Then, once you got used to your new role, there may have been times when working 20 hours actually felt like it took less time and energy than during that first week!

While it’s more obvious when considering the new things in your life, the same concept holds for each commitment on your plate.

Holding space also applies to any emotionally challenging situation, be it work related or not. All of us spent energy in processing the tragic event on 9/11, whether we knew someone in those buildings or not. Something to do with being human, I’d think. =)

Hold space for your personal well-being by getting in the habit of allowing more room in your schedule for processing these uncertain and rapidly changing times. It’ll actually help everything else go more smoothly!

• Do you underestimate the amount of time tasks will take?
• Do you unwittingly fall prey to distractions?
• Does your mind flirt with magically expanding time that just doesn’t quite fit within the confines of a 24-hour day?
• Or are you so tuned in that you know just what’s possible for the day?

Find out all this, and more!

Why the Today ToDo List?

A well-designed ToDo list has the power to keep you on track with minimal effort. A poorly-designed list can leave you feeling frustrated and like there’s always something else to be done.

The Challenge

Since our eager, over-active minds reliably add 20-2000% more items than can possibly be done in a day, the Today List Challenge is to see how many days you can get the right, and right number, of items on your daily ToDo list.

Right items = feel good about your progress made for the day.

Right number = cross them all off in one day without sacrificing your well-being.

Sounds easy, right? Hmmm, deceptively simple is more like it! How real is your mind’s version of realistic? You’ll soon find out…

You can report progress in the Comments section below or at The Natural Professional’s discussions on Facebook.

Grab a buddy for encouragement and accountability. (Do keep the competitiveness level low. This is really about you learning how to better work with your habits and tendencies.)

My bet is that by consciously putting your attention on your list for the month with the intention of getting the right, and right number, of ToDos on it, your productivity and satisfaction will shoot up like the tomato plants in my garden. Impressive!

Go ahead, give it a month. Dedicating attention to this crucial part of your workflow will pay off in spades in the future.