Any time you think you’re not doing what you need to be or you’re doing the wrong thing or something seems easy or is taking too much time, graph it.
Up to down is the effort it will take to accomplish the task. A lot of effort or very little effort.
Left to right is the amount of time it will take to accomplish the task. A lot of time or very little.
Plot your tasks and prioritize the fast and low effort tasks.
That will free you up to do one of two things.
Figure out how to break the long and a lot of effort tasks down into short sprints or it will finally give you the time and energy to tackle the long run, high effort tasks..
Sometimes (most of the time?), we need to clear the road so we can drive the distance.
When you don’t show up, you do yourself a disservice.
You allow fear to win and you start from scratch in the habit of overcoming it.
When you don’t show up, you miss out on learning, trying, failing, communication, connections–everything that makes us feel fulfilled at the end of the day.
More importantly, though, not showing up hurts the organizer and lowers the value of all those who did show up.
You’re not just ripping yourself off, you’re ripping others.
If someone calls on you, please show up. If you opted in, it’s even more important you show up.
Stay Positive & Nothing Breaks Trust Faster Than Not Showing Up
You’re more likely to reach for the alcohol if it’s in your view. Same for sweets.
Likewise, you’re more likely to reach for vitamins if they’re in your view. Same with vegetables. (Curse the freezer.)
There are obvious actions you can take to stay hygienic.
There are actions you can take to stay healthy in the digital era, too.
Remove social apps from your phone and only log on from a laptop.
Keep your phone in the living room when you go to sleep, in your bedroom when you’re eating and off when you’re out with friends.
Don’t read the comments on your content or the content of anyone you admire. Rather, don’t read the comments at all. The sincerest forms of communication won’t be found in the comments section.
Look up when you’re walking in town, in the state park, into the door of your work and to your desk.
Cut two things from every email you write. The anger and the length. No one makes the time to read every word and they’ll read it in the worse voice regardless of length.
If you’re logging on, make sure you create something that someone will appreciate. Don’t simply sulk in all that others are doing.
You’re doing important work even if you don’t see it. Because what’s important is the doing part.
Yet, regardless of the work we’re doing, we’re going to run into sunk costs. Those pesky things we called investments at the time that we can no longer get back.
It’s those nonrefundable purchases or those items we bought but never used or the things that we got but then ignored for something else.
Thinking back to what can be a sunk cost doesn’t help us make educated decisions about the future, though.
If you were to get tickets for a concert that you couldn’t refund or trade then your friends invited you over for game night, either decision costs you what the tickets cost.
In that scenario, thinking about monetizing each experience doesn’t help you because they both cost the same, but you can think forward to which you will have more fun doing.
Consider the business decision of signing a contract for a social listening tool that tracks media coverage of your business and sends you a daily digest, but instead of reading the digest you spend 20 minutes per day training your team on building relationships with the media.
Both actions cost the same as what you paid for the contract, but what matters is the future outcome of where you spend your time.
We call them sunk costs for a reason. They’re sunk. Let someone else waste their time in exploring the things left behind, and if they don’t realize that you left them because you had a better investment, so be it.
What’s more is the emotional equivalent of sunk costs: emotional waste.
Too often we wrestle quantifying all the time, energy and emotion we’ve put into something. We have identified with it and made it part of the story we tell others about ourselves.
It’s tough to leave behind, but, like sunk costs, what’s important is that we make the choice to pivot toward something that puts us in a direction of happier or greater impact.
Regardless of the decision we make, the emotional waste is the same. What matters is what we do going forward.
It’s likely there are people who are advocating for a change that will impact your industry.
Those who wanted to save trees, advocated for the death of the newspaper. At the time, outlets thought it would do them over if they had to use less paper or if the price for it increased.
Or consider child-labor laws.
Businesses thought they would have to close their doors if they could no longer have children working in their factory. Certainly they couldn’t survive without the cheap labor.
During those pivotal shifts, there were companies that fought the impact, spent millions (billions?) to prove why sticking to what they were doing was the best way forward.
Then there were other companies who embraced the impact to their industry. Who pivoted. Who acknowledged the need to change and improve.
The challenge is to remain in a long-term thinking position.
Turns out, the companies who threw a fit were the ones that wanted the shortcut, short-term profit and who were short-wired to ignore ethics.
Change might be a threat for every sort of business, but the long-term thinking ones tend to handle it better.
Knowing you might not be a business owner yourself, it’s worth spending a few minutes reading about brands that you’re supporting. It might change things for you.
And, again, change might be a threat, but if you can focus on the long-term impact of your purchasing decisions, you’re sure to handle it better.
This post was inspired by KOHANA cold brew coffee. A coffee worth sharing as much as their story.
