You know the week I'm talking about.
You start with a plan. By nine thirty something is on fire, so you go put it out. Then there's another one. You move fast all day, you help a lot of people, and honestly you're good at it. Then you get in the car at six and can't name one thing you actually moved forward.
That's not really a time management problem. Most of the leaders I know who feel this way are already organized. They have the lists. They have a system.
The problem is what they're looking at.
I'm getting ready for a workshop with a group of leaders next week, and this is the thing sitting on top of everything else for them. Too much going on. Everything urgent. And underneath all of it, a few projects that actually matter, untouched for weeks.
Here's what I think is going on, and it's simple enough to skip right past.
When you look at a big project, you see the finished thing. The whole build, all at once, in one glance. And the whole thing is too big to do today, so your brain does the reasonable thing. It puts it back down and goes to find a fire, because a fire is something you can actually finish in twenty minutes.
You're not avoiding the work. You're avoiding the size of it.
So, here's the fix, which is old and boring and works every time.
My wife calls it micro movements. My high school English teacher called it divide and conquer. Same idea, forty years apart.
Start with the outcome, because most stuck projects are really just fuzzy ones. What does done look like? Write it in one sentence. If you can't, that right there is a clue about why it hasn't moved.
Then cut it up. Not into phases. Into steps small enough that you could finish one before lunch.
Then do one.
That's the whole method.
The piece that makes it stick is something I keep coming back to. A to B to Z.
Z is the finished thing. Z is where most of us want to live, because it's the exciting part, and because somewhere along the way we learned that having a big vision is what serious people do.
But you can't do Z. Nobody can. Z isn't an action.
You're standing at A. All you ever have to see is B. One step, close enough to be obvious, small enough that it isn't scary. Then you get to B, and B becomes your new A, and you go find the next one.
You never do the whole thing. You only ever do the next piece. That's true of a project, a habit, a hard conversation, a company.
Here's the part that took me the longest to appreciate. One small, finished thing does something to your head that the whole plan never does.
When you take one real action on the thing that's been sitting there, something loosens. It stops being a heavy blur you carry around all week and turns into a normal piece of work with edges on it. You get a little proof. Proof beats motivation, because motivation shows up when it feels like it and proof just sits there being true.
Most of the time you don't need a better system. You need one honest step, taken today, on the thing you've been carrying.
So, here's the one thing for this week.
Think of the project you keep dragging from week to week. You already know which one it is.
Now write down the very next action on it. Not the next phase. The actual next physical thing you'd do, small enough to knock out in fifteen minutes. Make the call. Open the doc and write the first paragraph. Send the one email that unblocks it.
Then go do it before you do anything else tomorrow.
One step. Then look up and find the next one.
Until next week!
Jon