Clients often ask, “What app can I use to take notes, keep me accountable, calm me down, manage my time, help me be more productive, etc.?” My answer is, “Yee gads dude! Stop with the GAGs!”
Call me old-fashioned. But you can also call me: practical, money and time-saving and efficient.
Why surrender your brain to GAGs? Your head, heart and hand are quite capable using basic tools to achieve the same end. of You feel busy exploring different GAGs, learning the GAGs, and getting distracted by the ads and social media temptations that come with GAGs. Are you so dependent on your GAGs to be rendered impotent if your battery died or if you lost your phone? Folks, that’s scary.
(The only GAGs I recommend are those that serve as an alarm clock.)
Instead of relying on GAGs to get stuff done:
Write down your list of to-do’s on paper.
Highlight the priorities for the week.
Break down the steps to big tasks.
Schedule the tasks in your planner.
Keep an analog clock or an hourglass on your desk to see time passing
Cross out the DONE to-do’s and feel the love.
Choose the next priorities and repeat.
What did that cost you? 15 minutes? A few cents for the paper and a pencil? Writing things down gave you a plan, an intention, something tangible and distraction-free!
Detoxify your use of GAGs. Get down the basics. Contact me at Rebecca@MindfulCommunication.com
These are familiar refrains of my clients’ family members. Entrepreneurship is all consuming. It leaves little energy and mind space for family and friends. They crave and deserve our undivided attention – to be “present” or ‘in the moment’ for, at least, part of an evening or a weekend. If they can’t have quantity, at least give them quality time. Here are some ways:
What kind of a partner, parent or friend do you want to be? How do you want to show up, participate and fully engage with your family? Visualize that person.
Are you being as productive as possible during the day so you can close the door on work at night? Poor planning, distractions and time-wasting meetings follow you home.
During family time turn off your phone and all notifications, hide it, shut down your work computer.
When you walk into your home, you are entering a theater of experiences different than yours. Forget yourself and ‘get into the movies’ of your family members. Listen with rapt curiosity and try to imagine what the day was like for them.
Plan family fun. Choose activities that are stimulating and novel enough to overwhelm the white noise of your work wins and woes.
Learn to how to shift your attention from yourself to others with a hefty dose of mindful listening. Get my book: The Zen of Listening: Mindful Communication in the Age of Distraction.
To be truly COREageous is to have healthy exit strategies for your anxiety.
Many of my clients tend not to have many people they can openly express worry or disappointments – especially about their business challenges. It’s like Voldemort (Harry Potter’s nemesis)!
They may contain their anxiety, not for a lack of supportive listeners, but because they want to protect close friends and family members from worrying about the business and making matters worse.
In coaching we do this, but if you don’t have a coach, be the coach of you and speak the problem aloud to yourself. Name it. Define it. Go for a walk in an empty field or hit the beach and TALK IT OUT. You can be straight up with nature.
Dissect the big problem into smaller pieces. Cut it down to size. You may find a solution. It’s still unpleasant, but it’s more manageable and less hopeless. What steps can you take to rectify the problem?
You’ve gone from feeling frightened and weak to being capable and strong.
Listening to yourself is only one aspect of a mindful listener. Want to learn more? Contact me at Rebecca@MindfulCommunication.com
Jesse from DC writes: I have ADHD. I’m an intrapreneur working on my own big projects within a large company. How can I make transitions back to work easier? If life takes me away for more than a few days, it can take me up to 3 weeks to get back to my normal level of productivity. Additionally, shifting between projects while at work is also very challenging.
Difficulty with transitions of all sorts is a common concern for many of my clients.
When you’re away, keep some semblance of your basic routines intact – your sleep regimen, exercise, and diet. It’s so much easier to get back into your rhythm when your routines are minimally disrupted.
For on-the-job task transitioning, some folks set alarms or block out a duration of time for moving from task to task. However, those alarms and schedules are often ignored when you are deep in a task. If you must jostle between projects, seamless transitioning between tasks starts with planning transitions.
For example, a section of Project A could have several steps. Write them out. Where are some reasonable transition points in Project A? At what point in that step-by-step plan would be a good time to transition from Project A to Project B? Before you leave that step in Project A, make a note of where you left off. When you re-engage with Project A, you’ll be able to pick up where you left off and waste no time. Do the same with Project B.
Are you an entrepreneur with ADHD? Get COREageous! Contact me at Rebecca@MIndfulCommunication.com
I had to find a company to haul away my aging antique piano to make room for a new one. Founders, take note of this unique experience.
I found Trash Can Willys junk removal online (www.TrashCanWillys.com) and called to arrange a pick up. Within 5 minutes they called back.
Grateful and enthusiastic for my call, they listened and were extremely accommodating in arranging for an in-person estimate.
Two very nice guys arrived on time, extremely courteous and well dressed. Here’s the clincher: With no outward display of emotion, they could see that I was very concerned about trashing my beloved, but aging 100+ year old Chickering piano. They assured me that they would move the piano with utmost care and put it back together for their thrift shop instead of junking it. I was thrilled to imagine that they might find a home for it. What trash collection company does that?
I wouldn’t expect that folks in that business would have an ounce of empathy for me and my piano. They charged me a reasonable rate and were very conscientious about telling me how they planned to dismantle and move it safely. They offered to arrange a pick-up date to coincide with the delivery of the new piano, so I wouldn’t be without one for long. I was wowed.
Later than day, I referred Trash Can Willy’s to three friends and clients looking to downsize. They, too, were wowed.
The morale of this episode is to abide by the cluster of COREageous customer service greatness: enthusiasm, gratitude, courtesy, efficiency and caring.
Don’t wait. Establish low cost/no cost ways to offer excellent customer service early on in your startup. Contact me at Rebecca@MIndfulCommunication.com
Persons with Executive Dysfunction have weaknesses in the cognitive processes required to plan and direct activities, known as the executive functions. They include task initiation and follow through, working memory, sustained attention, performance monitoring, inhibition of impulses, emotional regulation and goal-directed persistence. The executive dysfunction can be mild to severe and may be associated with ADHD, anxiety or depression. Executive functioning is essential for academic and workplace success and a particular necessity for entrepreneurs.
"It takes more than courage to be an Entrepreneur, it takes CORE."