Its been a crazy (good) day full of little fun surprises on the work front. We are making progress on all fronts with our clients and we have lots of new and interesting business coming our way.
Towards the end of the day today, I was talking with a colleague on the challenges of balancing everything we’ve got going on at once. We were sharing our little secret strategies for being productive amidst the mayhem. I shared with her one of my favorite visuals: the “whack a mole” game that most of us play all day. Remember that arcade game when we were kids? It’s exactly the same. We spend our days trying to whack those moles back in their holes… and the game never ends.
We talked about how hard it is in this day in age to even complete one thoughtful task without looking at email or something similar. It seems that our brains are wired now that if there’s one moment of delay in progress, we should just flip over to something we can actually accomplish. We want the immediate satisfaction of being productive. But unfortunately that leaves us with emptiness at the end of the week when we haven’t done any of the critically important things we set out to do! So we have to set aside time for those things first and protect that time from others, but more so from ourselves and our tendencies to get distracted!
On a related note, I shared with her something a wise woman once shared with me… if you ever find yourself sitting at your computer not being productive (and being productive could very well be doing something you truly do find fun), then step away, or your brain will start learning to be lazy in front of the computer.
Here’s the funny thing. Once I hung up with her, my last scheduled call of the day, I sat down to get back to work. I wasn’t sure where to begin since none of the things I needed to do had to be done right now. So I glanced through my work email … and then checked my personal email… and looked at Facebook… and there I saw a funny blog from Jim … and then realized what I was doing and decided to confess about it to all of you on my blog. Not that any of those things are bad, it was more the way I was wandering around aimlessly looking to be productive.
Acknowledgement is the first step. I’m going grocery shopping and then I’m going to make a lasagna. I’ll get back to it all later.
