I’m looking at my desktop. I have 8 short stories I’m supposed to read and give comments on. I have a short story to revise, another to finish, and about 6 good starts to short stories that I am tempted to work on instead of the one I need to finish. And there’s always the temptation to start something entirely new based on a fragment of conversations overheard at brunch.
I am looking at my coffee table. I have a stack – nearly a foot high – of magazines I want to read. 1/3 of the stack are issues of Vogue that I want to flip through in search of hairstyle and clothing inspiration (I’m planning yet another makeover). The other 2/3s are miscellaneous mags that have articles I want to get to… eventually.
I am looking at the whiteboard in my home office. It has four columns of ideas for projects, and lists of people and tasks under each one of them. Then there are the post-it notes and the clipboards.
I know I’m not alone here – people who love to make stuff have no shortage of stuff they want to make. Some get only as far as the sketches – books and books full of sketches, drafts, schematics, flow charts. Others actually get started on prototyping but don’t get through the revision process. Folks like Seth Godin remind us that the measure of success is ’shipping.’
So this article in GOOD has an interesting couple of ideas on how to overcome the gorging on ideas that some of us suffer from. One idea I really was drawn to is the idea of the “sober monitor” – someone who isn’t high on ideas and can help you see the ideas worth sticking to and to be skeptical of the half-baked or far-fetched.
There are some other really useful ideas here – and I bolded the ones I like best…
For his part, Karnjanaprakorn has made some major improvements. He divided up his projects with an action-oriented partner, and he has committed himself to saying no to the majority of new opportunities and ideas that come up. He explains, “When your purpose and mission in life is to make the world a better place, it’s really easy to get distracted and overbook yourself. You’ll paralyze yourself and end up doing no good.” Karnjanaprakorn has also taken some practical steps to increase his focus and productivity. For starters, he has completely cut out meetings during the day that have no intended outcome. When people contact him out of the blue—or when a meeting doesn’t have a clear agenda—he politely declines. The problem, as Karnjanaprakorn describes it, is that everybody, especially in the world of social innovation, loves to talk about changing the world. “The problem for me is that I get excited about a lot of these ideas and it gets me sidetracked,” he says.
The action-oriented partner is the thing I’ve recently started using a lot more. It helps that I’ve met some amazing people who are interested in collaborating; and that I have a few old friends who have always been incredibly supportive (to the extremes of: giving me places to live, finding me jobs, introducing me to cool ideas and new fabulous people).
The second one seems trivial by comparison but is a big problem for me. Like a lot of people in the strategy/planning business, I start out the week with a few conference calls and meetings already on my calendar, and then I watch the week fill up with them. I’ve started pushing back on meeting requests using a tip from Tim Ferriss’s 4-Hour Workweek. I ask people for a quick agenda, “so I can be prepared.” Then I can cut down the meeting from 2 hours to 10 by answering the questions that can be dealt with in e-mail. Often it means not bothering about a phone call at all.
But it’s too easy to blame all those external distractions when the real problem is addiction to new ideas. We need air traffic controllers and co-pilots to help us get the right ones off the ground.