When You Are Lost In The Wilderness
It’s Sunday, 8 September 2024, 11:00 AM here in India. I am spending the weekend with my parents, celebrating the Ganesh Chaturthi festival. I wrote this newsletter on a Wednesday before my trip when I realised I mis-scheduled last week’s newsletter, which arrived in your inboxes on Saturday! Sorry!
Wednesday mornings are hard to get out of bed. Today was no exception. I lay in bed, meditated, took deep breaths and logged in with the Caveday community to do my deep work.
Caveday is a community for adults who want to get deep work together in a safe and facilitated online community. I’ve been getting so much work done by joining “Caves” every day.
Use this link to try Caveday for $1 a month.
Imagine you are in the wilderness, lost and trying to survive until the rescuers find you.
You are hungry and need to start a fire to roast some vegetables or meat you have hunted. You don’t have a tinder box with you, but you have a magnifying glass.
Remembering your science school lesson, you can start a fire with a magnifying glass, the sun, and some dry leaves. So you pile up a small mountain of dry leaves under a nice, clear, sunny spot and focus your magnifying glass above it.
After a short while, the leaves catch fire, and you have a comforting set up to make tea, roast food and keep yourself warm for the night. The relief of finding a solution in a challenging situation is palpable.
But instead of focusing your magnifying glass on a single spot, imagine you kept shifting the position of the magnifying glass all around, seeing which spot would catch fire. So what happens then? You don’t start a fire no matter how many spots you shift it to.
A magnifying glass needs to focus on one point to be effective.
If your days at work are a constant source of overwhelm and a case of too much to do and too many different things to do, then you might be like the magnifying glass focusing on too many points.
The pithy quote, “When everything is important, nothing is important,” is attributed to Patrick Lencioni, a well-known author and management consultant. It summarises the above metaphor well.
If you treat all your tasks as equal, urgent, and important, you fail to focus on what truly matters. This leads to a lack of clarity and direction in your work, which then spills over into your everyday life.
To have more direction to your work, and work day, start with answering these questions,
- What is important for me to accomplish for this year/quarter/month?
- Do my everyday actions reflect and align with what is important to me?
- If not, how do I bridge the gap between my intention and action?
What will you focus your magnifying glass on? How will you align your energies towards that spot where you want the fire to start?
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If you’d like to boost your productivity, reduce your overwhelm and gain more sanity from your work and life, I invite you to book a 30 minute, “no-obligation” discovery session with me.
From My Reading List
ICYMI: Procrastination can be a hard habit to break. One of the ways to break it is to eat your frog. (Being Sane)
Books: I have just finished reading “Mindful Eating: The Guide To Rediscovering A Healthy and Joyous Relationship with Food ” by Jan Chozen Bays. Here is my take on the book.
