You know how some of us work best under pressure but always think \u201cIf only I had more time\u201d? But even if we had more time would we really be any better at hitting those deadlines in a calm and orderly manner? After all, the majority of must-not-miss key dates, like tax returns, Christmas presents, birthday cards \u2026 come with a massive 12 months\u2019 warning, yet thousands of us will, every single year, as regular as the clocks spring back or fall forward, wonder where the time disappeared to. Again.<\/p>\n
You don\u2019t need a brain the size of a planet to work out that if what\u00a0you’ve\u00a0got to do is a chore, it\u2019s likely to be put off to the last minute, but \u2018last minute\u2019 and \u2018tax returns\u2019 is probably the worst coupling since ITV put Todd Carty and ice skates together. So why don\u2019t we just get on with it? Well, plenty of people do and it\u2019s called being organised; it could be learned but I believe it\u2019s instinctive (and also really impressive) – they don\u2019t have to think about doing their duty, it just happens, like packing their suitcase for the summer holiday with at least a week to spare, buying Christmas cards the year before and always knowing exactly where to look for the password that\u2019s in a really really safe place.<\/p>\n
Then there\u2019s the rest of us. Running late or just making it, looking serene but with an invisible plume of stress squirting from our ears and armed with an impressive \u2018to do\u2019 list that never gets completely \u2018done\u2019. And there we have the problem; the list. Anyone looking at the list will know instantly that\u00a0we’ve\u00a0got all the bases covered, but the list is a very passive means of moving forward; it\u2019s a series of actions, but what if only some of the actions get crossed off, what happens? Nothing. Clearly the list is not the man for the job. Someone told me how easy it is to confuse action with progress so this list that so many of us need or can\u2019t start the day without, is keeping us busy, but not helping us to progress. Yesterday I was reminded that I\u00a0hadn’t\u00a0posted a blog since June. I cannot think for the life of me where July, August, September and this month have been hiding themselves; I was too busy to notice. But the blog is important to my business. It demonstrates that I have a voice, that\u00a0I’m\u00a0relevant and that I make time to look outside of my communications discipline to explore other areas of life. So there should never be a four month gap, but there is, and that\u2019s not good.<\/p>\n
From today\u00a0I’m\u00a0starting to keep a very different kind of list, although I have no idea what\u00a0I’m\u00a0going to call it, because now it\u2019s going to be about achievements, it\u2019s going to be about goals rather than activity and it\u2019s going to be tougher to ignore, because the result of not striving to achieve will be far worse than the outcome of not crossing off \u2018buy more copier paper\u2019.<\/p>\n
To find out how I fare with my new regime, see my November blog.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
You know how some of us work best under pressure but always think \u201cIf only I had more time\u201d? But even if we had more time would we really be any better at hitting those deadlines in a calm and orderly manner? After all, the majority of must-not-miss key dates, like tax returns, Christmas presents, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,7,6,1,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brand-values","category-crisis-management","category-dont-lose-reputation","category-general","category-honest-broker"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmorrison.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmorrison.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmorrison.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmorrison.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmorrison.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmorrison.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43,"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmorrison.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39\/revisions\/43"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmorrison.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmorrison.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmorrison.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}