August 24, 2011

productivity – the hard ass approach

2012 Printable Calendar from e.m.papers

Rita Mae Brown Quote on work from e.m.papers 2012 Printable Calendar


Warning: this post is not for the faint of heart and those who don’t like salty language.

I don’t know about you, but from time to time I encounter days when the urge to stay in my pajamas, eat potato chips and watch old Sex and the City DVDs is so powerful that I’m almost totally helpless against it. Almost. This is when I need to get out the big guns and use the ‘Hard Ass’ approach to productivity.

I’ve mentioned Debbie Allen in a previous post, and she must be mentioned again, because the verbal ass-kicking she gives to all the young hopefuls is the attitude that comes to mind when utilizing this method.

The hard ass approach is basically just giving yourself a good kick in the pants to get to work. Nothing more, nothing less.

It is not new or revolutionary, it eschews any new-fangled ideas of ‘going at your own pace’ or ‘self care,’ and refers to the hard-scrabble wisdom of our grandparents and great grandparents, who probably had much harder lives than we did. Basically, quit yer bitchin’ and get to work!

Quotes that embody the hard-ass approach include these oldies but goodies:

“The Art of Writing is the Art of Applying the Seat of the Pants to the Seat of the Chair.”
-MARY HEATON VORSE

“Genius is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.”
“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work. “
-THOMAS EDISON

“The Harder I work, The Luckier I get”
-SAMUEL GOLDWYN

“Just Do It”
-NIKE

The message here is clear. If you want success, however you define it, you have to put effort and elbow grease into it. Ask any entrepreneur who is hailed as an ‘overnight success.’

Forget any new age, magical thinking ideas about daydreaming your way to fame and fortune; roll up your sleeves and get to work, dammit.

I came across this little ditty earlier this year from Communicatrix where she so aptly captures the sentiment of this method. On days when I need to use the ol’ Hard Ass approach it helps to hum the chorus to myself repeatedly. I hope you find it as helpful as I do!

Filed Under: Steal This Process Tagged With: , , , 17 Comments
August 10, 2011

productivity – the feel good approach

Execute - The Feel Good Approach to ProductivitySetting Goals, Defining Scope, Estimating and Planning. All of this is worthless if you don’t actually do the work, execute, produce, deliver, ‘ship.’

Productivity. There are libraries full of how to master it and web page after web page explaining how to get some more of it. I have nothing new to add to this conversation, but I will share what works for me.

I find myself jumping between two different mindsets and approaches to productivity: The feel good approach and the hard-ass approach.

It’s a sunny day today and I’m feelin’ good, so I’ll start with the feel good approach. The feel good approach is all about working naturally and realizing that ‘slow and steady wins the race.’ The feel good approach reminds you to (cue Stuart Smalley voice over):

  • Work with your natural rhythm; if you’re most productive in the morning schedule you’re important work then.
  • Don’t overload yourself. Realize what you can realistically accomplish and don’t plan any more.
  • Work on your most important tasks first, if the rest doesn’t get done, come back to it later.
  • Tell yourself you’re just going to work for ten minutes, you’ll usually work longer, but if not that’s okay, too.
  • Remember sometimes you can just get one thing done a day that moves your business forward, and that’s…okay.

Use the feel good approach when your reserves are low and you need to gently prod yourself to your sewing machine, your laptop, or whatever item is the tool of your trade.

Next time we’ll take a look at the hard ass approach, so grab your helmets and strap on your seat belts.

Filed Under: Steal This Process Tagged With: , , , , 11 Comments
May 11, 2011

6 Easy Steps for Understanding Your Creative Project Management

Project Management Process

Six Basic Project Management Steps

Getting your feedback on project management helped me realize that a handy dandy graphic always makes large concepts easier to understand and break down. At it’s most basic, project management involves these six steps:

  1. Goal Setting
  2. Defining Scope
  3. Estimating
  4. Planning
  5. Executing
  6. Reviewing

I’ve mentioned that I’m tackling project management at step two, defining scope. There is already a lot of good content on setting goals out there. Having clear goals is an absolute prerequisite to project management, if you don’t know where you want to go, you can’t figure out what you need to do to get there. However the bulk of Project management focuses on the part that happens after you’ve set your goals.

Defining scope is when you look at all of the potential projects you want to tackle and make the hard call about which ones to pursue and which ones to abandon (or put on hold.) Your goals and objectives are the criteria against which you decide which ones make the cut.

Estimating helps you determine how long it’s going to carry out the projects you’ve set out to do. Once you’ve got your scope down, you estimate how long you think it will take. Once you do this, it makes sense to revisit your scope and see if you need to cut more or maybe you’ll find that you may have time to do more than you thought. We left off here, and I’ll continue with estimation next week.

Planning is when you map out your scope against time. When you look at your schedule and see how many hours are actually in the day. It’s when you can look at all the activities in your life (family, friends, exercise) etc. and see how to plot in your work. It also helps you really SEE what you don’t have time for and helps you become more conscious of you spend your precious time.

Executing is the doing. This is where we’ll talk about resistance, tracking the time it really takes you to do something, streamlining your work process, sitting down to focus and minimizing distractions.

Reviewing is ‘coming up for air’. Revisiting your goals, your scope, your plan. Checking progress, confirming that you’re on track (or not, and if so, why?) determining whether or not your goals and scope still make sense.

There is a lot of stuff under each of these buckets. I‘ll use the graphic to help illustrate ‘where we are’ in the overall topic.

Filed Under: Product Management, Steal This Process Tagged With: , , , 5 Comments
May 10, 2011

Like a Rolling Stone: Finding Momentum with Goddess Leonie

goddess leonieEach week, I receive at least a dozen emails, comments, and tweets asking the same question: How do you do it?

One big part of the answer is momentum. I concentrate on creating, sustaining, and then releasing momentum.

So does Goddess Leonie. That’s how she’s built a BIG business around art, empowerment, and spirituality. She’s no snake oil saleswoman, either. This lady has the skills to coax out your inner Goddess, liberate your creative muscle, and spin out your own momentum.

Which means I just had to talk to her for round 2 of The Art of Action! By the way, join me for a FREE live preview of The Art of Action, my digital coaching program, tomorrow. Click here to get all the details!

Goddess Leonie

Below, you’ll find an excerpt from our interview:

TARA: Let’s talk a little bit about momentum. You strike me as a person who has a great deal of momentum. You kind of see success and good fortune as the ticket to more success and good fortune as opposed to an excuse to kind of get lazy. Would you say that’s accurate?

LEONIE: Absolutely. And, you know, I think the thing is, I love my job. I love creating. It’s my hobby, it’s my dream come true. If I wasn’t getting paid for it, I’d still be doing it. So, just to create is a total joy. The success & abundance that comes after it and from it that’s icing on the cake.

I just want to dive back into creating again and create something new. I’ve got, you know, like 70 ideas for the next thing I want to create. And I’m thinking, I just need to get it all done. I just want to create. It’s going to be so fun.

TARA: So do you have any tips or advice, or just a sense of how you actually go about cultivating that sense of momentum in your job and in your life? I know you said you love what you do but are there any kind of tactics or strategies that you use to keep your brain moving in that forward direction?

LEONIE: Totally. I don’t allocate a large amount of time to projects because the projects that I let germinate and marinate, they’re still not done. I’ve got an oracle card deck I started three years ago that I’ve been teasing out. And now it’s just a ginormous pain in my ass because I just want it done. And, it needs to be out there and yet the more time you give to something, the less momentum it has.

I don’t allocate a large amount of time to projects because the projects that I let germinate and marinate, they’re still not done. The more time you give to something, the less momentum it has.

TARA: Yes, I totally agree.

LEONIE: So I must prefer just setting a date and going, “It needs to be done by this time.” You work your butt off to get it done – I call it riding a wild donkey.

A donkey of any idea turns up and you just ride it until it’s done. Until it can go out into the world again. For example, I created my 2010 workbook, which is, you know, a really popular resource of mine. I took three days from the idea coming to me until I sent it out into the world. I just, you know, it came, I did it. I worked my butt off. Came about Christmas time and it was out before New Years.

You just ride the wave of inspiration and work your butt off and ignore everything else while it happens. And you know, for mothers you can’t totally ignore all existence of course. Everybody’s got responsibilities and blah, blah, blah. But you can still ride wild donkeys. For example, I had an ebook that I needed to finish by last week and I just knew that the amount of time that I got to have on the computer and the time I need to look after my daughter, that just wasn’t going to measure up.

And so my daughter and I ended up creating the ebook together by painting on paper at our veranda using non-toxic watercolors. And, you know, she messed up that ebook great! It was torn and she sat on it and she painted all over it and it looked glorious. It was so gorgeous.

Really. You have to let some things give and let miracles flow through you. Just let life happen, you know? So that’s what we did and that’s how I got more stuff done. And it was so much fun that we’re not painting our first kids book together. So, why not?

You have to let some things give and let miracles flow through you.

TARA: Beautiful. I love that you didn’t…despite the fact that you realized that you really didn’t have enough time, you didn’t negotiate on your deadline for yourself at all. I think that’s so important. People look at people like you and like me and they see us get things done really really fast and they attribute that to, you know, all the other stuff that’s going on in our lives.

Okay, so we’ve got stay at home dads, great. Yeah, that’s true. We’ve got this, we’ve got that, and that’s all fine and good, but, you know, we have other liabilities as well and sometimes it just comes down to setting that deadline and working with the deadline you’ve given yourself. And don’t give yourself an extension, you make it happen. I love that.

LEONIE: The best way to do it is to say that something begins at a certain date and what you don’t have finished then just, you know, make it happen.

TARA: Yes. I’m familiar with that.

LEONIE: A month ago I announced that my Become a Business Goddess ecourse was going to start on May 1. And I was like, “this will be plenty of time for me to get it finished, you know, and work its magic.” And, of course, life gets in the way. My daughter and I have both had two rounds of chest infections in a month, which just has been fun.

But, you know, still that ecourse will be done. I just work my magic. When she’s napping, I’m working. And I don’t think about anything else. I, you know, am not doing a maximum amount of social media, I’m not doing a maximum amount of blogging at the moment because I’ve got something to finish.

TARA: Right. And, you know, if we had “real jobs,” we’d have these kind of deadlines, too and we’d have to put that amount of time and that amount of energy and that much thought into what we were doing. And I think people think, “okay, if you build something for yourself, you get to cut yourself a lot of slack.” And that’s just not the case.

LEONIE: Yeah, don’t do that. Just get stuff done. Send it out into the world. Things feel so much better and so much more free flowing when you just let the idea come through you. Pour it out with whatever you have at that time and let it flow out into the world because, you know, I so believe our ideas need to be in this world to give to the people whatever they need to hear at that time.

Things feel so much better and so much more free flowing when you just let the idea come through you.

I’m not a big believer in stopping up that flow of inspiration and divine guidance and wisdom coming through you. Just let it go through you and let it go out. It feels so much better that way. The more you create, the more just comes through and creates through you. It’s just a wonderful experience.

The more you create, the more just comes through and creates through you. It’s just a wonderful experience.

Visit Goddess Leonie on her blog, follow her on Twitter, or check out her new Become a Business Goddess ecourse.

Join me for a FREE live preview of The Art of Action tomorrow! I’m talking success, filters, and hard questions – this is high end motivation without the high end price. Ready? Enter your info below to get access to the call and the opportunity to win a coaching session with me!









 



Filed Under: creating action, creative thinkers Tagged With: , , , 8 Comments