Sometimes Chaos Can Be A Good Thing

To say that the last month has been difficult to navigate would be an understatement. For a time, I really did not know why I was doing anything. My consulting business suffered and I had a really hard time functioning from day to day. Is there an upside to all this? There is, sort of. All this uncertainty and chaos served me as a red flag that something was seriously wrong in my business game plan... and in my life. No need to bore my reader with the boring details of all the particulars. Suffice it to say that it was time for me to rethink my priorities.

Putting a lot of time into a project without assessing it critically along the way is very much akin to mindlessly throwing a lot of money at a problem. In neither case will one accomplish very much by doing that.

What is this all about? It is about maintaining forward momentum in any endeavor. It is also about knowing what one is trying to accomplish. Additionally, we must always understand our limitations. As individuals, we are subject to certain limitations.

In the business context, it is about knowing what your core goal is. That core goal is the benchmark against which all strategies and activities must be tested. If doing something in particular does not contribute to the accomplishment of that goal, directly or indirectly, then it is not worth the doing. If a strategy will not get you any closer to realizing the core objectives than you are now, then that strategy should be scrapped.

And then there is that thing about taking on too much at one time. At a buffet, it is so easy to load our plate with much more food than we can possibly eat. The only serious consequences in that situation is that some perfectly good food will be wasted or that we will gain some unwelcome fat. However in business, taking on too much can lead to a really chaotic situation in the least and a scenario that can potentially sink the ship at worst. That is where I found myself not so long ago.

My personal life got squeezed badly. I have stopped doing things which gave me a respite from the push and shove of being in business... and which I truly love doing. I am isolating myself from people whom I would like to cultivate as friends for my wife and me. And the worst of it all is that my sleep habits are totally out of whack. I know that to be true and yet I feel compelled to allow my sleep deprivation to be a dysfunctional symptom of my life at the moment which I choose to tolerate.

I know what some of the solutions are.

• Set up a segway which will get me out of the house early.
• Set up a segway which will enable me to leave work at the end of the day and put all thoughts behind me.
• Set up a schedule and stick with it.
• Organize my time to increase productivity and to improve the % of admin/marketing time to % of billable time.
• Set a premium on getting a good nights sleep every night.
• Restate my goals and keep them in front of myself all the time to stay on track.

It is all very well and good to know these things. The thing about it is that I now have to figure out how to implement each item in the list and a few items that I forgot to list.

However, I am getting away from the central point of this particular posting. This period of chaos and uncertainty was the canary in the coal mine for me. For a few weeks, I watched the canary die very slowly. Then in the last two weeks, I have let my business and my life slow down to the point that I might as well be standing still. So the chaos served a useful purpose for me. I won't get the time I have lost back or the clients and readers of my blog who I have alienated. But as always, the situation is what it is. I have momentarily stumbled.

As always, this is pick-yourself-up-and-dust-yourself-off time. My forward momentum has momentarily been brought to a standstill. It is time for me to pick up the pieces and start out again. It is time for me to put the key in, start the engine on and get going again. A short to do list as the first order of business would be a good idea. But after having done that, it is simply a matter of picking out the most important thing on the list and take care of it... and then go to the second item on the list and so on.

God help me, I am a writer. I write myself out of these mental funks, as I am doing now. Sorry that this is not thrilling content in this particular posting. But this is just one of those functional postings that are mostly personal and mostly important just to me.

Anyway, if you stumble onto my blog and read this, I hope that it is maybe a little useful to you. If not, I have written some really compelling stuff early on. So muck around in the listing of articles and stories I have written. I am sure you will find something to your liking.

Cheerio... I am going to bed.

Kindest regards,

Howard Fireman