Productive Failure

I made about 1,000 updates to our website today and I tend to do this… maybe you can relate.

I remembered something I needed to do with the website earlier today, so I logged on to take care of it. You’re going to laugh when I tell you what it was… It was just to change the footer of the site.

For some reason, it just didn’t feel right, so I poked around on Squarespace and found one that I liked better. It’s a small change right? Just a few minutes and I’ll be done! Once I put it in place, it asked for an email address on the right hand side, which reminded me of something else I’ve been meaning to do, get my email address set up. If your brain works like mine, you probably started to chuckle when I was “reminded of something” while doing something else. It’s something that is typical in our household as we sporadically work like this at times. We start to declutter, leading to Goodwill trips and Half Price Books trips and thoughts of yard sales or Facebook Marketplace and our brains can just go and go and go and… well you get it.

This lead to scheduling sign up and email marketing and new web pages and learning about Squarespace and a whole load of other behind the scenes things that I won’t bore you with. At the end of the day, it did end up being very productive; but, not for the thing that I intended. You see… I’ve got housework that I’ve been neglecting for some time now. I’ve got poop piles in our front yard from our little dog, Maisy, that I haven’t picked up for a few weeks now and it honestly looks a minefield out there just waiting for someone to come through the yard. (Babe if you’re reading this, I promise I’m going to pick it all up before Jackson’s birthday party.)

How do we stop our brains from spiraling down into work that is productive, but not on the correct things? How can we create priority lists and ensure the decisions we make fall in line with that list?

It’s simple, actually… PLANNING

Yes, that nasty ‘P’ word that we all “love” so much. That word that when brought up in a marriage could bring a little tension between you and your spouse.

The thing about planning is, it’s boring. It’s time consuming and can feel like a waste when you’re doing it sometimes because, let’s face it, you already know what needs to be done, right? No way that YOU need to plan your days because you execute perfectly every time without thinking about it.

The reality is, planning will nearly eliminate these cluttery “productive” days from happening because you’ll know what needs to be done, and when it needs to be done. I didn’t need to setup any scheduling or email until April… that’s two and a half months away. But, I did it because I wasn’t prepared for this weekend. I wasn’t prepared when these extra thoughts crossed my head.

I’m going to link a video by Michael Hyatt below. He is the creator of the “Full Focus Planer” which I’ve been using for some time now on and off, and it’s been a game changer for me when I use it. The video talks you through how to plan your “perfect” day if you’ve never done it before.

Enjoy your planning and productivity and shoot me an email and let me know how it’s going for you. There’s POWER in PLANNING and if we can learn to harness that POWER, we’ll be unstoppable.

Until next time…

Josh