Taking 20 Steps in the Same Direction

Happy Sunday Coach! 

I hope you had an amazing weekend where you got to rest and recharge and that last week for you was a successful one.  

I was at my daughters soccer tournament all weekend and got to hang out with a great group of parents in Dublin, OH.  The girls didn’t win but the parents had fun 🙂

Anyway, today I want to share a simple system for getting ahead faster.   

A lot of people think to get ahead, they need to be busy doing a lot of things. 

Nope.   

I believe that productivity and business busyness are two very different things.  

In fact, I would say they’re in conflict.  

If you’re feeling really busy, chances are you’re not being very productive.  

You’re just moving slowly in a million different directions.  

I have always thought about being busy is like taking one step in 20 different directions.  

Productivity is mindfully and powerfully taking 20 steps in the same direction.  

There’s a lot of people out there who are spinning in circles.  

They have a lot of activity, but they don’t have a lot of purpose and wisdom. 

Productivity is about powerfully moving in the same direction.  

And about knowing where you’re going and why.  

That is what I am trying to help you accomplish in this newsletter.  When you know what you want and you know your value system, it is easier to live it out and be congruent inside and out.  

And one of the ways you can do that is by making tangible plans.  

There’s a great quote, I believe, by Benjamin Franklin and he says, if you fail to plan you plan to fail. 

One of the fastest ways to be productive is mapping a plan. 

Greg McEwen in his book Essentialism, says that if you take just a little bit of time upfront to map out and make a plan of what you’re doing, you can move forward faster and execute with purpose.  

If you never actually make a plan, then you’re always going to be blindly working your way through a lot of noise and busyness.  

The plan will never be perfect and you will need to iterate as you go.  

But just having a mental framework and a plan makes things so much faster.  

In Essentialism, McEwan describes how he sketches out outlines of articles on one day and then the next day he just writes the articles.  

When you have the outline built, it’s so much faster and easier to write. 

In Recruiting Made Simple, I teach coaches to create an outline before the month of what you are going to focus on, and then batch create it because it is so much easier and faster.  With the work I am doing with Dan Tudor, monthly content is done for you if you want to go that route (that is even easier.  Email me and I will send you info).   

I want you to apply this principle in your life.  

I want you to make some simple plans for your weeks.  

Make a plan so that you don’t have to think about it.  

There’s the book called The Paradox of Choice and one of the reasons why willpower is so pervasive in most people’s lives is because they haven’t made powerful decisions.  

When you can remove options and eliminate thinking and just have a game plan, you can then move forward with purpose.  

And so my challenge for you in your life this week as you focus on moving forward is making simple plans and creating more structure so you can remove the need to make a lot of decisions.  

You want to just make it as simple as possible.  

Make outlines for your weeks, for your days, for your working time, for your morning routine.  

If you spend even three or four minutes the night before just making a simple outline of your morning routine, it’s more likely to be successful than if you wake up and have to figure it out right when you wake up.  

Don’t wake up and have to figure out what you’re doing. If you fail to plan you will plan to fail.  

And if you are good at just making simple outlines and structures and plans and frameworks, you will fly. 

If I’ve taken the time upfront to map things out, I can move with lightning speed rather than continually second guessing, thinking about it, or figuring it out on the fly. 

This simple outline serves as a guidepost.  

It will give you direction and a little bit of structure.  

Giving yourself structure is a forcing function. You are creating constraints that move you in the direction want to go so you can move forward faster.  

Get better at planning to move yourself forward faster.   

Take massive action this week coach!  

If you want to talk to me about this article or want my help applying things like this for you, email me at mandy@busy.coach.   

To your success!  

Mandy Green