In This Episode…
The lessons appear to be coming thick and fast at the moment. I’m not sure whether that’s because I’m now ready for them or whether it is just a coincidence. So today I got two key insights that I think are going to make a huge difference to my productivity.
What do you think?
Episode Show Notes…
This Is Something I Am Going To Have To Change
I have been working on a major project today. One of those that started the moment I began work and have done nothing else since. A solid 4 hours of dedicated time to the one project.
It has been rewarding and all consuming once I dived into it.
It is the development of my website. I talked about this a few episodes ago when I did my on the fly prioritisation.
Well I bit the bullet this morning and started working on it.
The first thing I had to do was do a complete audit of all the sites I have across the different web hosts I have. I’ve had a range of websites for a number of years now and so they needed a bit of spring cleaning to work out what is where.
If I am to commission someone to come and sort my sites out then it is an exercise I need to do so I can give them a good brief.
Well during my review, I kept coming across tasks I’d initiated in the past but that I’d never followed through on.
For example I have reviewed my sites before and realised that the hosting company still had old domains logged with my account even though they’d expired. I’d approached them before and asked what to do about it. They sent me a support e mail with the instructions….
…That I never followed!
That’s just one example.
There are many more like that and I won’t bore you with the details.
All it shows to me – is that I have a tendency to start things but not to finish them.
And that is an identity thing I am going to have to change.
Being aware of the problem is half the battle in my book.
So this afternoon I overcame my usual “do it later” mentality and shifted it to a ‘DO IT NOW” mentality with a load of new website subscriptions I’ve just made.
Usually I’d have left them in to inbox to process later. But today I got on with processing them.
There was a reluctance and a resistance as I did them, but I overcome it and got it done. I’d be interested to discover where that resistance comes from. Though I do question whether I need to know.
My new mantra:
DO IT NOW!
Letting Go Of Thinking I Have To Do It All
I am quite excited by the prospect of getting my new website up and running. I’ve been dabbling in websites for years.
20 years ago you had to dive into html programming or use very crude templates that you found some way of being able to tweak.
Then along came WordPress and all of a sudden putting up a website was much easier.
Being quite technical I was able to do a lot of the early grunt work myself. I always outsourced the design work because whilst I’m mildly artistic, I’m no graphic designer.
And then as WordPress developed, so did the range of themes and tools that allowed you to create some really fancy websites with drag and drop, point and click functionality.
That was a joy.
And so most of my websites I have built myself.
And so it was really tempting to dive in myself to set up my new website. Having just invested in a new system for creating modern websites, still using WordPress, I was practically salivating at the idea of diving into the bowels of my new site.
It is very hard to forget my engineering roots!
But…
I know I can’t do that.
To divert my attention to the technical details of my website would be a distraction I can ill afford at the moment with so much going on.
And…I need to be really honest with myself here.
There are much more qualified and far more capable people who can do the web site stuff for me.
And they’d do a far better job then me and do it much quicker too.
So I have to let go of that.
The prospect of relying on someone else to do work I know I could possibly do, does raise some interesting emotions.
There is a trust issue which has crept up for me.
There is a feeling of vulnerability which is interesting
But this is something I have to address.
I think I mentioned in a previous podcast that I am in the process of developing 3 super powers that I’m convinced I need moving forward. Productivity is one of them. Selling is another.
The third one is remote team leadership.
This may well be that opportunity.
