Is There An Elephant In Your Office?
Imagine what it would be like to have an elephant in your office?
- Crowded - no room for anything else
- Distracting - a challenge to get anything accomplished or focus on anything but the Elephant
- Things would begin to smell after awhile
So, you say, this doesn't apply to me. I don't have any elephants in my office. Look at your To-Do list and see if there are any items that have been on the list longer than two weeks, a month, maybe longer? What about the big project you haven't started because it seems so big? Is your filing current? Do you have past due accounts that, if collected, would help your current cashflow?
Is it difficult for you to take on anything else because you have this To-Do looming over everything else? Do the important things have difficulty finding their way onto your schedule? Are you distracted and unable to focus because of the weight of this big project?
So, maybe you do have an elephant in your office. How do you care for and feed an elephant?
- Give the elephant to someone else - can you delegate all or parts of the project?
- Exchange the elephant for a mouse - same color, but smaller (could you scale back the big project to a smaller version)
- Groom just one foot at a time
If you've ever been involved with taking an animal to the county fair or your dog to a show, you know there are certain steps to be taken - a good haircut, a bath, nails manicured, etc. The same is true of the elephant or, in this case, your big To-Do. Can you focus on just one piece of the project - just groom one foot?
Take just 15 minutes and think about what four segments you could divide this one project into. What foot would you step forward with? List the sequence of steps it would take to accomplish this first segment. OK, time's up. Tomorrow, spend another 15 minutes working on step one... Ahhh, see you've already started working on the elephant - one foot at a time!
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