Wouldn't it be great to spring out of bed and get to work every day feeling fresh, exuding energy and smiling with confidence because your business is succeeding and you love your job?
Well let's face it. Life doesn't always work like that.
No matter how much time you spend keeping your spirits high, and no matter how well your business runs, life is going to throw obstacles in your way. Whether it's a difficult customer, a child with chicken pox or the sad demise of a much-loved family pet, now and then there’ll be days when you'd rather stay in bed.
Times like these can seriously reduce your productivity and they can really hurt your bottom line.
The first thing to do is to accept that that's just the way life is. Next, put together a plan for how you’re going to handle it next time something like this happens to you. Ideally, this should be done at a time when you’re feeling buoyant and everything is going swimmingly. Think of it as a crisis management plan or a form of insurance against unforeseen stress.
One of the most damaging aspects of these low energy periods is the loss of focus. You might find yourself drifting from job to job, or being distracted by emails and phone calls, working re-actively rather than pro-actively.
An action plan spoon-feeds you your daily schedule, removing the need to make decisions about what to work on, and reducing the chance that you’ll get stuck drifting from distraction to distraction.
Use these three types of action plans to ensure you keep putting one foot in front of the other and making progress towards your goals:
- A strategic plan for the bigger picture, which mainly includes marketing and administration
- A standard template for each of your projects, which lists tasks that are common for each job
- A set of regular admin jobs that need to be performed daily or weekly
None of these plans is overly detailed, because the last thing you need to do during tense times is spend too much time distracting yourself further by creating 'to do' lists.
Lists shouldn't define your working life; trying to structure your day too precisely can be counter productive, but these action plans do provide a gentle guide, and in times of distraction provide a very useful reference point to get you back on track.
Little lists give you small achievable tasks to do that fit into your larger plan. You don't need to make any decisions, you just need to find the next item on the list and focus on getting a tick in the check box next to it. On a really bad day, sometimes that one little tick next to an important task can feel like an enormous achievement - the difference between making progress and wasting a day.
How do you ride out life’s lows? Do you have a plan that helps you cope or do you go into free fall and sort out the mess when it’s all over?