A client of mine recently admitted
that they put tasks in their calendar but don’t do them. She told me that “Time isn’t the problem. I make the space to do things but then I can’t remember why I put them in.” She has good intentions and knows what she wants to achieve but when push comes to shove she’s not sure how to get into the zone to complete the task.
Common error
I asked her a few more questions and what we found was that the appointments she’d made in her calendar were vague, too much work to decipher and not fun! Rather than coming to the time to ‘review immersion course outline ahead of next launch’ what greeted her was ‘immersion course’. No wonder her brain was blanking on her and having a bit of a tantrum when it was time to get into ‘it’. ‘It’ was very unclear and lacked any direction. Making our brains think too hard about the next step of a project before having done any work at all is a common error.
What we want to do with our calendar appointments is to take the thinking out of the equation. Our brains do so much for us that we want to relieve it of having to hold on to things that it’s already decided. Getting really clear and writing out the next step in our calendars so that when it’s time to sit down and get into ‘it’, we know exactly what that ‘it’ is is one such thing we can do to help ourselves. This way it’s like leading a horse to water rather than asking the horse to find the water first.
Simple tweak
My client and I went through the next few weeks in her calendar and we turned each fuzzy appointment into a clear action item. They were so clear that I felt I could have picked them up myself and done them! By the time we’d finished, she was ecstatic, “I know what I need to do so that when it’s time to do them I know what to do!”
A lot of the time, it’s a simple tweak in technical skills and habits that will help someone become more productive and make the most of their time. My client is quite good at following through IF she knows what she’s doing. All she needed to do to up her game and to believe in her abilities more was to be across her commitments and projects through a small tweak in behaviour. In essence, we found the solution needed for her to follow through on her follow through!
If you can relate to my client’s struggle, try making your next steps as clear as possible. It may just be the silver bullet that you weren’t aware of needing.
I’m offering FREE 30 minute chats so if you’ve got something getting in the way of contributing your best work, book a time to chat.
Talk soon,
Christie
