Now life is coming at us like that, though, and again to thread through it,
you're not born doing these practices. But if you build in these practices,
so they become habitual to you, then you can surf on mind like water.
And I guarantee you, I spent thousands of hours, one on one, with some of the busiest,
best and brightest people on the planet, walking them through this methodology to
actually get them to implement this, you're not born doing it.
Very simple steps you need to follow, there are five of them.
If you wanna get any situation more clear and under control,
very quickly, you need to capture stuff
that's not on cruise control, s tuff that has your attention,
you need to clarify exactly what you're gonna do about it, if anything,
organise the results in some trusted place that you know you're gonna step back and
reflect and review on the contents and some appropriate recursion,
so that then when you engage your attention, your focus on your activities is done
from a place of trust, not hope. That's it.
But these five steps have five very different best practices and different tools,
it's not all just one thing. So, the first step you need to do is you need
to grab stuff that's got your attention, by the way I'm curious,
how many of you even for the few minutes we've been talking up here from this stage
have had your mind go somewhere that has absolutely nothing to do with what's going
on in here? Let's see.
Okay well, by the way, if where your head went
was doing creative developmental thinking, down track your brain hadn't been before
that was adding value to what you were thinking about, I'd go,
“dude, stay there, that's a cool place for your head to go!”
That's not where most of you went. You went to something that you're
not appropriately engaged with yet. If you thought, “I need cat food,”
if that pops into your head more than once, you're not appropriately engaged with your cat.
So, you don't have to go very far to see where to implement this,
start to notice what's on your mind. If you wanna clear it,
you better start to notice what has your attention.
And that could be cat food, it could be “I need to get a life,” “I need to get a wife,”
any of those. If you can't do them the moment you think of it,
that's something you better capture. Collect what has your attention.
Little, big, personal or professional, doesn't matter.
Cat food will take up as much brain space as strategic plan at 3 o'clock in the morning
if it's just in your head. So you gotta get it out, folks.
And if nothing else, you wanna do what we call a “mind sweep.”
Pen and paper, all you need. Just get that stuff out
and don't let it land in here. That's a big habit to change, by the way.
As soon as you commit something to yourself or to somebody else,
you absolutely, if you're like me, you're gonna grab something, a little notepad
that I carry in my pocket, and write it down.
Now, if you stop there, you'll likely become a compulsive list-maker.
And that's not gonna help either, you'll have lists stuck all over god and creation out there.
that's gonna suck right back up to your head if you do not move it to the next step,
which is to then get those captured things emptied.
And you get them emptied, not by necessarily throwing them away,
but by clarifying what they mean and what you're gonna do about them.
So, if I were sitting with you and you'd dump stuff out of your head,
then I'm gonna take each one of those and say, okay, “what is it,
is it an actionable item (yes or no)?” If it's not, it's either trash, reference material
or something to hold on for later review. If it is actionable, you need to answer
a very critical question, what is the very next action
you would need to take? Very next action?
E-mail to send, something to buy at the store, something to talk to somebody about.
And once you decide that, you can either do the action,
if it takes less than two minutes you should,
you can delegate it if you can give it to somebody else, that's helpful,
and if it's neither of those, you need to park it in some sort of
inventory of all of your next actions that you've decided you need to take.
If one action won't finish it then you've got a project you need to capture.
That'll clarify those e-mails, those notes that you take,
the notes that you're gonna come back from this conference with,
you should get this conference off your mind as soon as you can.
The way to do that is you put it through this process.
Then you need to organise the results. If you don't finish them that moment,
you need to park some reminder somewhere that it belongs.
Quite simply, you don't need a real complex system, you do need a project list.
Very few people have that.
You need to keep track of your actions that come in two flavours,
actions that happen specifically to days and times, that go on your calendar
and then actions you just need to do as soon as you can do them, around all your other stuff.
You also need to keep track of actions and projects other
people are doing, a “waiting for” list. That'll actually hold most all of your
commitments operationally, by the way. Fairly simple system.
And, of course, the non-actionable stuff, you need reference material, you need trash
and you need a “someday maybe” list. Someplace on hold, bucket list,
might wanna do that but not now. You need to capture that, that's a creative list.
Then, of course, you need to look at these lists at the right time.
If you have a list of things to talk to your life partner about,
you need to look at them when you see him or her.
So, you just need to make sure you lift up and look at a higher perspective.
If you've looked at your calendar for the last two or three days, you did this,
you lifted up a little bit, looked across the space and time spectrum
to locate yourself in space and time, that's all this is.
It's just most people don't have the full inventory to review yet.
Then, of course, you do stuff, based upon that. If you've captured, clarified, organised
and reviewed, then you’re making trusted choices
about how you engage and choose what you do. In a way, it's that simple.
Now life is coming at us like that, though, and again to thread through it,
you're not born doing these practices. But if you build in these practices,
so they become habitual to you, then you can surf on mind like water.
Guaranteed.