We all know the feeling. We get up early and work all day. Before we know it, it’s time to go to bed and we still haven’t gone all the way through our “To Do” list.
Sound familiar?
Owning your own business, or even just working at a job, is time consuming and can be stressful when things seem to pile up. It seems like you are running a race with yourself and can never win.
I’ve learned that I’m never going to win that race and there will never be the time when I have nothing to do. There will always be more marketing that needs to be done, more products to add to my website, more customers to deal with, and more unexpected situations popping up.
Unless you hire someone to take over the management part of your business, accept that you are going to be busy. That’s business — any business or any job that you happen to be in.
And for me, busy is good. Otherwise, I would be bored and searching for something to do or giving up and taking a nap. But there’s another side to this as well.
Even though your business or job may provide the income you need to live, it should not be the total expenditure of your time or life. We are human beings with personal needs and desires. We need to spend time with family, friends, and even just with ourself. We need other interests — be it enjoying nature, religion, reading, sports, and, yes, even watching TV.
So how does a person manage all these things? Some are essential. Others are needed in order to be a happy, well-rounded individual.
Everyone does this differently. Some people create very strict time tables, scheduling every hour of the day.
Others set goals to reach before moving on to another goal. Some do one thing on Monday, another on Tuesday, etc. Some of us can only concentrate on one problem at a time. Others, are great at multi-tasking.
Here’s what works best for me.
I record what has to be done each day on my desk calendar and then fly by the seat of my pants. I try to get the “must be done” items out of the way as early in the day as possible. Then, I work on everything else. Some things don’t get done for several days, but they are not the “must-do that day items.”
There are numerous books available on how to organize. But most organized people don’t really need those books. Organized folks have their day planners in order, their supplies and inventory neatly arranged and the papers on their desk sorted according to their own special plan.
But then their are the rest of us. We live in chaos. We weren’t born with those special organizing super powers. We keep seven or eight screens open on our computer at once. We store files in a pile where we have trouble finding them later and our inventory list and to do calendar is in our heads.
We need something stronger than just another way to be organized. What we really need is to acknowledge that we are unorganized people. Our chaos will never go away so we have to build a system around chaos.
The Planning System for Chaotic People
Chaos and system are not words that go together easily but they can work together. The very basis of the chaotic system assumes that things will go wrong; interruptions will happen; and we won’t be able to find something.
By following the chaos planning system, you’ll end up doing more than you assumed you could and end up far less stressed than before you had the system in place.
This system isn’t for everyone. So if you’re one of those lucky organized people, you can stop reading and move on to reading something else
But here is my system for chaotic people who live in a chaotic world.
I’ve always made it a point to keep the personal part of my life separate from the business needs. But the business part of my world is often chaos. I don’t create a “To Do” list at the end of each day. Yes, I keep a calendar so that I don’t forget something. I have much more inventory than I will ever use and it’s not very well organized. I have files but I also have piles.
But if you’ve known me for very long, you also know that I manage to get a lot done. I own and operate several different websites. I create my own sites using wordpress, optimize each of them, and don’t pay a dime to anyone to be listed #1 in google for a number of my keywords. But I also take time for lunch with my friends at the Senior Center, walks with my dogs, reading my favorite mysteries, visits with my family when they come to see me and simply enjoy life.
This may give you the erroneous impression that I’m talented in some way.
I don’t believe in talent. I believe in hard work and planning. Yes, planning in a chaotic environment and world.
Welcome to the World of Chaos
Even though I admit that my world is chaotic and plan for it, many of you do not. You run your lives and your businesses as if chaos doesn’t exist. And when the unexpected strikes, you are unprepared and stressed.
There is chaos in every life and every business. Whether we like it or not, things tend to go wrong. You get a sudden order that has to be delivered right away. The kids get sick. Your employee can’t make it to work. And on and on.
My plan doesn’t care what day, month, week, or year it is. My plan doesn’t begin with what needs to be done. It begins with what can go wrong. As I said, I keep a calendar and fill in the appointments and meetings as I learn of them. But I never fill every inch of my calendar with a list of meetings, deliveries, and what has to be done. If I did that and chaos stuck, there would be no room for it. Instead I mark off at least three hours each day for planned chaos and personal enjoyment of life.
But you may be thinking, who has the time to take three or even four hours off in any day? The truth is that most of you don’t have that kind of time. And yet, as we go through each day, struggling to get everything done, we somehow manage to waste that much time anyway. The result is stress. A lot of stress. The feeling that we’re letting someone down. That we aren’t accomplishing what we should.
The First Step
So the first step of Planning for Chaotic People is to just put two-three hours of chaos on your calendar starting tomorrow and then work the rest of your day around it. Sometimes you’ll use every minute of those chaos hours. Other times you may not need all of them and you’ll find yourself getting more done than ever before.
Okay, that’s your day. How about your week? Just as you plan for chaos in your day, you should also plan for it in your week. So choose any workday as chaos day. For me, that day is Thursday. I try to never schedule anything on that day unless absolutely necessary. If for some reason, another day that week is better, I feel free to change it.
This may seem like a holiday or a day off but it really isn’t. This is the day when I tidy up all the loose ends that I didn’t have time for during the week. Even though you may think you can’t take a whole day out of your work week, plan for it anyway. You’ll find that you’re a lot less stressed knowing that you have that “chaos day” to get the things done you missed during the other days.
You didn’t start your business so that it would be all-consuming with you always working. You started a business to get more control over your life. If you’re constantly tied to your business, you never have time to relax. So plan a week periodically where you have someone else answer your email, fill your orders, and take care of any necessary busywork.
This isn’t a work week but a break week. It doesn’t mean exhausting yourself with another to-do or places-to-see list. It means leaving the business world behind and taking it easy. I find this the hardest of all. Doing nothing is a learned skill and not one that I’m very good at. But it’s essential that you give your brain a chance to just get used to doing nothing. You’ll be amazed at how much more refreshed you’ll feel.
The Planning for Chaotic People Program is a plan where you take chunks of your day and your week to either catch up on work or catch up on having a break. It also means planning for at least a week out of your year (preferably longer) to just do nothing and leave the business world behind.
Sound crazy? I thought so, too, when I first heard of someone who actually did this. But I tried creating unfilled spaces in my calendar and then filled them without feeling stressed.
Planning Is Only Part of the Picture
Planning for chaos is only part of the picture. Taming and even eliminating some of that chaos makes life much simpler. And chaos comes in when least expected and from all directions.
If you really want to remove chaos from your life, you need to be competent at what you do. For example, you want to build a website or you already have one and you want to optimize it. But when you go to do it, you’re frustrated because all the available information is overwhelming and you don’t have time to sort it out and become competent. You say ―I’m lousy at that!
Whether you realize it or not, it’s not taking the time to learn how to accomplish a goal that robs you of free time.
Sure, it takes a few weeks or even a few months to learn how to use a program well or how to optimize a website, or whatever other skill you don’t know but need to know. And everyone is lousy at this or that until they become competent.
It’s only when you’re incompetent that you feel lousy and defeated. The better you get at doing something, the less you spend time trying to work things out the hard way and the more you get done.
You don’t have to spend a whole day on learning a skill. Break it down into bits. Even the busiest of people have 15 minutes here or there to spend on something that will save you time later.
But you can’t do it one day this week and another day a week from now. You need to keep the brain learning daily. Each segment of time will build on the previous day’s segment if there isn’t too much time in between. But if you don’t work at it every single day, you will remain mediocre.
When you need help, get it. Trying to be a one-man band is a lot of hard work and usually fails. There are times when learning a new skill — particularly one that you won’t use on a regular basis — isn’t worth using your time to learn it. Instead, hire someone to do it for you.
When I first created GiftBasketNetwork, I knew nothing about optimization. My previous partner, had done all the website work. I knew I had to learn quickly. And I did.
When I contacted an expert on the subject, she told me, “Yes, I can do it for you for a fee. But learn to do it yourself, and you can do it forever.” Her favorite quote was “Give them a fish and they will eat today. Teach them to fish and they will eat every day.” She worked with me, teaching me how to manage the website as she made the necessary changes for me.
Distractions are one of the biggest creators of chaos. Becoming competent in your business or job requires your full attention. Subscribing to every email newsletter, that is going to teach you how to make a million dollars or that will change your life, is just opening the door to more chaos. Checking Facebook or your favorite forum every few hours is another chaos creator. Do it once a day and you’ll learn the same thing in much less time than if you checked it several times during that day.
If you really want to live without stress in the midst of chaos, then only way is to plan for it. Then learn the things you need to know and use what you’ve learned to create more free time than you ever thought.
Occasionally, look at your business model and how you are operating your business. As our businesses develop and grow and as our personal situations change, eliminating stress may mean making changes in our business.
You may need to hire an employee or transition from creating all your products yourself to using a dropship company to create some of them. You may want to eliminate a service or a product line or add a new one. Each business and each individual is different and our personal situations are never static.
An example of this is when my husband unexpectedly died last November,. A whole different kind of chaos was added to my world as I had to learn how to deal with all the changes that death requires of the survivors. We had planned well but there were still things that I was unfamiliar with that required time, knowledge, and help. Fortunately, I had already made changes in my business model that made the integration of this new challenge into my daily activities easier.
I had anticipated and planned for chaos and that made a tremendous difference. And, it can for you, too!