If you are like me you have a ‘few’ ongoing projects on your plate.

Things that would fall under the ‘contributing to bottom line’ category and vision for business if you were to complete them.

Carrying those projects around on our shoulders, or in our mind, weighs a ton!

Enough to bloat our perception of our daily workload, to dilute our focus and contribute to a vague sense of dissatisfaction or even feeling of failure to achieve.

What’s the answer?

TAKE A LOAD OFF

By that, I don’t mean what you may think.

Well, not exactly.

The first thing you are probably waiting for me to say is get rid of some projects.

So I will.

Get rid of some projects :0)

Of course it only makes sense to cull the projects that no longer are of interest or that you have decided are not in the best interest of your business.

Sometimes time has a way of making our decisions for us.

You can either dump them, give them away or get some help with them.

WHAT ABOUT AFTER THAT?

Do you still have a list of projects that you really want to finish but don’t know where to start?

Feel guilty because you can’t possibly get them all finished ‘fast enough’?

What could be the answer?

Take a load off of the pressure you are putting on yourself to get it all done, this minute.

In other words…

SLOW DOWN

Sometimes the answer is exactly what you don’t think it is.

I have wrestled with this feeling myself.

It makes me want to rush and hurry to get ALL of them finished right away.

So guess what happens. I make small headway with some of them, something else comes up and I never finish any of them.

So I have a new plan that I think you can benefit from.

1- Don’t feel that you need to finish them all NOW.

The catch 22 is that by starting one only we know we have no chance of finishing the rest of them soon. We have to sacrifice all but one of them for now.

That can be hard to do.

But in doing that, we are raising the chance of actually getting even one of them finished and into our income funnel.

And then we can go onto the next.

2 – Make a plan and set an end date.

This is extremely important. With no end date, there usually is just that, no end date.

Outline when you want to have each project finished, what steps you need to do to get it done and when you need to do them. I found that when I did this, the weight lifted off of my shoulders and my focus increased 100%.

3 – Don’t get discouraged if your plans go awry.

But do stick to a plan. Even if it means shifting gears a little.

I made my plan in the beginning of the year and was going gangbusters on getting a project finished that I am very excited about doing. I was making real progress with a focus I had not worked with in a long time when I got not one, but 2 emails within days from some people that I had been waiting on for months to help me get a major project finished that really HAS to be done asap.

Talk about bursting your bubble!

Not wanting to lose them again, I had to put project #1 to the side for a bit. Doesn’t seem like a great start out of the gate but I am at the point of being able to move on the original while they do the majority of the work on project #2.

The main thing is, keep your eyes on the prize. No matter what. Even if it means coming back to it.

Especially if it means coming back to it.

I hate to admit it, but in the old days I may have been onto project #3 and have already forgotten about project #1, leaving it unfinished in the wake of distraction.

ALWAYS TAKE THE STRAIGHT ROAD

A wise person once told me that it is better to take the straight road.

It gets you there faster.

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