Do you get stuff done? Do you feel that you are constantly moving forward, making progress, realizing your aims and goals?
Or like most of us, and especially this past year, do you feel that you’ve been stuck, like a fly in amber, unable to really move as the world has changed around us all?
Want some ideas on how to move forward and feel more empowered? Read on!
I saw this pop into my LinkedIn feed earlier today, posted by Jean-Phillipe Distretti, and it prompted me to share a few thoughts around the - very powerful - idea presented here…
Being a bit of a natural sceptic, I went into Excel to check the math - and it’s true!
For a number of years now, I’ve tried to follow a tip that I’m pretty sure I picked up from the Tim Ferris podcast. The tip was this:
“Create 1 thing every day.”
It’s a great idea. Every day, generate something. Today for me it might just be this blog post (it is Saturday!).
Consistent
The key word in the headline graphic for me is “consistent”. Some days you get big things done - Penny finished her thesis on Thursday, the culmination of 4 years of study - that’s a big one! Some days you only get tiny things done - yesterday for me it was creating a quick 10-page mini-guide to “Creating Panels” for photographers in CANVA as a promotional giveaway for my talks and workshops.
Kaizen
Masaaki Imai wrote the book “Kaizen” almost 30 years ago and helped kick-start the continuous improvement movement which has helped millions of businesses and people to improve their processes and lives. It’s the same idea - keep making small, incremental changes and over time, productivity will increase and goals will be better realised.
+1
Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a fabulous concept I ran into in 2020 when I was doing the Professional Diploma in Creativity, Innovation & Leadership with the UCD Innovation Academy. A friend of mine on the course - Jennifer Lynch, had won the John Kelly Award for UDL in 2020 and introduced me to the idea, which led me to undertake the AHEAD Digital Badge for UDL.
One of the core concepts in UDL is +1. Just make 1 change to your teaching practice. Just 1. We’re back to the same idea - small, incremental change. It’s so much easier to just make 1 small change than to be confronted by a massive mountain of a project to try to get your head around.
Project Management - WBS
As a lifelong project manager, I teach the WBS tool to many different cohorts of students. WBS stands for Work Breakdown Structure and is a diagram that visualises a project as a hierarchy of smaller sub-tasks in layers. Break writing a thesis down into the key stages, then the chapter headings, then break each chapter down into sub-headings, and soon you have a set of much smaller, less intimidating tasks to pick to accomplish. But do them all and you’ll have written your thesis.
How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time!
Start…
Don’t put it off
Just do it!
There’s a reason this is NIKE’s slogan! As one of the world’s top brands, NIKE are pretty clued into the zeitgeist. The longest journey starts with that first step - whether it’s Frodo leaving the comfort of his hobbit-hole at Bag End to destroy The Ring in the fires of Mount Doom (I LOVE The Lord of the Rings!), or Penny starting and finishing her thesis.
My amazing wife Penny is a psychotherapist. We spent last weekend creating her new website as she is now taking private online clients - check out Flourish Centre.ie. But this task had been a blocker for her for well over a year - it seemed too big, complicated and so had been put off and off. Eventually, I simply signed her up for SquareSpace, created a basic template site from the offerings, added a few placeholder pages and then let her at it! 2 days later Penny had a functioning website ready to attract clients and promote her practice.
Blank page syndrome is a real blocker - always use a template! It doesn’t have to be fancy, it doesn’t have to be right - in fact, it won’t be right. But a template gets you started, and once started you have momentum, the ideas start to come, the gaps begin to be filled, connections form and you’re off!
Perfection is over-rated
It only has to be good enough - this maxim was popularised by paediatric psychiatrist DW Winnicott. He was talking about the development of small babies and emphasising the role the mother (or the primary caregiver in her absence) has in their development. Winnicott emphasised that the mother need only be “good enough”. The mother does not need to be perfect.
And neither do you. We’re not all Captain Sullenberger having to save 155 lives by landing his stricken airliner in the river with literally seconds to decide what to do and then execute it perfectly.
So when it’s done, and it’s done OK, to an acceptable standard, let it go. Put it out there, submit that essay. Deliver that first talk. Sure, maybe it could have been better - so learn from the experience and next time, it’ll be a little bit better.
+1…
Commit to other people
Yesterday I delivered a workshop - the first of a series of 3 - on “Presenting Your Work” - which I’d never done before. To an audience of photographers from the Royal Photographic Society (no pressure then!).
It’s my own fault - in fact, the impetus for these workshops came from a blog post I wrote on this site back in October last year - “Creating a daily panel”. The day I wrote that it would have been my 1 created thing perhaps, but it led to opportunity, to new connections. And so when Melanie, the organiser for the RPS DIG SE group, contacted me and asked if I would consider doing the workshops, I said yes. And having committed, I was in. Was I challenged? Yes. Was I fearful and distracted before the workshop started? Yes. But did I do it anyway? Yes.
Kaizen. +1. Just do it. Commit to others. Good enough.
Everyone can achieve far more than we think - it just takes that first step, every day. Start today - you never know where that step will take you…
Well, if you’ve made it this far, at least some of the ideas above have probably resonated with you.
So, my question to you now is - what will you create today? What journey will you begin?
Thanks for reading!
Joe Houghton - March 2020
Asst. Professor & Director, MSc Project Management programmes, UCD Smurfit Graduate School of Business
Dublin, Ireland
Email : joe.houghton@ucd.ie / joe.houghton@gmail.com / LinkedIn
Tel: +353 86 384 3670
1. I'll be making a start on the panel for the afore-mentioned RPS series. Might be the words or might be the images.
2. More maps for my website.
The whole article really resonated with me. When Lockdown 2 began I hoped to catch up on all the walks (13) I was behind with on my website, I didn't so with Lockdown 3 I took a different approach by getting the worst bit for every walk published then plugged away at each walk's photos bit by bit. Earlier this week for the first time in at least three years my website was up-to-date re walks. I have now made a start on the mammouth job of checking all the pages for bugs/missing maps/photos that has needed doing since we redesigned it in 2018. I wouldnt have got this far without breaking it down onto managebale bits that I could pick up and put down as time allowed.