Day 10: Friday 20 January
Some days no matter what you do, things just don’t come out right.
The plan today was to really dig into thinking about, researching and writing about remote and flexible work.
Fair to say, my focus was off.
Here’s where my problem was…
Starting with bad to allow for the good to appear.
I was too focussed on getting it right, rather than just leaping into the shitty first draft – what ever that might be.
Here’s what I tried:
- looking up and reading relevant articles
- using Chat GPT to write and inspire some new thinking
- reading some of my old stuff
- writing some stuff into Chat GPT and asking it to respond
To be fair some of it was useful, but the reality is that what I did could have been compressed into half the time.
Some days you just do shit work.
I’m not proud of it, but I’m not going to beat myself up about it either.
This afternoon was better. Head seemed clearer, more motivated and did what I needed to.
Weekly review
When I look at the metrics and back over what I’ve actually done it doesn’t feel like a great week.
Yes I had another article published on the ACA website: Skill Stack and Charge More
Yes I had a good insight into a promising workshop idea.
Yes I even got much much clearer on what the fuck I’m doing here.
Yes I even defined my goals for the month and quarter as SMART goals.
Yes I managed to rewrite some of the more prominent parts of my website (not finished).
Yes I got my useletter out.
Yes I got my 5 Reach Outs done
…which in reality means that I accomplished more than I had planned to achieve this week. Which isn’t bad.
Yet I know my week wasn’t as productive as it could have been. Interesting.
It suggests two things:
- I wasn’t ambitious enough with my week; or
- My system for identifying what to work on over the week is not adequate.
An experiment for next week: upgrade my Task Central kanban board to flag for work to be done over the week. This will supersede the Planning my Week system for the week. Combined with the daily GTD system to prioritise most important thing to be done that day and/or the frog to be eaten.
There are some frogs I need to eat next week:
- email publishers with offer of my writing
- email some practices to offer my flexi-work workshop
- 2 surveys on linkedin and twitter – about workshop options and around flexi-work challenges.
Still giving myself a kick in the pants today!
