By Jill Stewart
Mid-quarter every spring our college students [especially the graduate students] start freaking out. They are tired of school, tired of juggling work and school, tired in general; they are ready to wrap it up. They are going in a million directions, all at once. My inbox is buzzing with both excuses and requests for extensions. I feel their pain and do my best to alleviate any stress my classes or assignments are causing.
Freaked out folks just don’t learn as well.
These meltdowns bring me back to when I was juggling little kids, a PR consulting business, clients, and well, just life. In those days I relied on my business coach, who was also a dear friend and mentor. Hal Wright billed himself as “The Wright Track for Small Business Success” and was also the author of “How to Make a 1,000 Mistakes in Business and Still Succeed: The Small Business Owner’s Guide to Crucial Decisions.” Hal was a big proponent of the simple act of regular planning and its potential impact for achieving success.
His tips apply as well to students as they do to small business owners, professionals, and gig workers. He was a calming presence during our monthly face-to-face meetings when I was trying to make it all work. Just talking things out helped, but putting them in writing was even better.
Hal found his Sunday mornings the best time to make what he called his “tidbits list” – capturing all those little to-dos that float around in our heads until we get them down in black and white. For me, it’s best to plan Friday afternoon as I reflect on the past week and look ahead to the next one. I often work weekends, so with my plan in place on Friday, I feel as though I can get a headstart with Saturday/Sunday items checked off before the official start of the week on Monday.
Embedded in Hal’s philosophy for small business success was to “learn how to spot crucial decisions that really make a difference.” It seems obvious: sorting the big consequential decisions [and tasks] from the ones that matter less is a form of prioritizing. Rather than careening from task to task, just putting the big stuff first and figuring out how, or if, the little stuff can wait is a good practice. Or maybe it’s the other way around: clear out the little stuff – and give yourself LOTS of checkmarks – before you tackle the bigger projects.
Either way, making time for regular planning is key. The time you take to make a plan will pay for itself in efficiency and stress relief.
I know it’s obvious. Planning is a simple, but powerful, concept. And if you aren’t regularly carving out planning time to celebrate large and small wins, then looking down the road to your next big challenges and priorities, no wonder you are freaking out.
Frequent Culpwrit contributor Jill Stewart came of age in the heyday of hippies; “freak out” was a treasured term of that generation.
How to Make a 1,000 Mistakes in Business and Still Succeed: The Small Business Owner’s Guide to Crucial Decisions is a book written by Harold L. (Hal) Wright. It serves as a practical guide for small business owners, home-based businesses, and professionals, drawing on Wright’s experience advising over 1,000 small businesses.