Right then. You have your goals, your categories of things you want or need to get done and you have your why, you have abandoned the “shoulds” for now.

So, lets get creative about how are going to achieve those goals. Abandon the capture list you wrote at the start of this process as we are now going to generate better process (obviously there may be things on there like paying the bills, those are essentials – but we will come back to them).

You see, there are probably much better ways to get to where you want to go other than the things you think you should be doing to get there. These thoughts are just results of old habits that we are now going to get rid of.

Sound good?

So, you need to now start thinking of ways that are “slower”, less stressful and more fun. Because it is all about the journey really. Imagine having a goal you are heading towards, slogging you guts out to get to it, hating every minute of it and getting hit by a bus just before you achieve it (I have talked about this a lot on previous posts).

The key questions you need to ask are these:

1. How will I know when it is done? Seems an obvious answer, but is it really?  How do you know? We all need to know where we are going. Think about it for a minute.

2. What ABSOLUTELY has to be there to get this done? Strip away the unnecessary tasks the irrelevant ideas and break it down the most basic needs and requirements.

And finally (and most importantly if you ask me)

3. What is the most fun way? Life is a journey, enjoy it! It may not be the fastest way or the most obvious way or the cheapest way, but it is the most fun way. Which means you will remain motivated and ironically probably do it quicker as you are enjoying thr process so much!

Want to Slow Down But Don’t Know Where to Start? Maybe one to one slow coaching is the answer for you? See the coaching page for details, I have worked with people from all over the world via Skype and telephone, we can arrange a time to suite you. Get in touch to find out more. Call +44 7711 204013 or email me.

Matt

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Chunking is one of the most powerful tools to de-clutter and slow your life down.

Chunking is very simple to understand, it is about levels of detail. Let me give you an example to make it clearer.

If we picked something like a car.

If we wanted to chunk that up (go to the next level of vagueness, the “big picture”) we could ask ourselves, “what is this an example of?”, in this case you may think, “transport” or “vehicle”, both would be right (there is no real right or wrong answers here).

If we chunked down, ie went to the next level of detail, you could say something like “make or model”, “colour” or “seat” (component parts), get the idea?

Often when people have become overwhelmed, they have chunked down too far and are going into far too much detail, making it seem like they have far too much to do! This leads to stress and that feeling of being out of control.

So the way to deal with this is to take your capture list from yesterday and organise it into bigger chunks.

Let me give you a quick example, say your capture list was something like this:

1. hoover 2. the washing up 3. pay the credit card bills 4. Cook dinner 5. Call my sister 6. Do some yoga 7. Walk the dogs 8. Sort my tax bill 9. buy a card for Simons birthday

OK, so we have 9 things there, not a lot, but still quite a lot to get done, So, to help us organise it we chunk them, we ask ourselves how some of these can be grouped together.

For example, you could go 1, 2, and 4 could be grouped together has “housework” or “chores”.

3 and 8 could be grouped as “finances”.

Get the idea? You may have grouped them differently, that is fine, remember there is no right or wrong answer.

So get you capture list and see what can be grouped together and next time we will take the next step to help you de-clutter you mind and get more organised!

Matt

I am going to start a new mini-thread over the next few posts about how you can start to organise your mind to move from being “Hare-Brained” to “Tortoise-Minded”.

(I have just realised, in all the excitement about moving to this new site that I never finished up the series about “How to Be Slow In A Fast Environment”! I will get back to that next week – or may finish it up as a podcast if I am feeling adventurous!)

The reason for this mini-thread is that often people give me the excuse (and it is an excuse) that they have FAR TOO MUCH TO DO to be able to slow down (as I have already started to mention here).

However, it is not how much they have to do that causes them to be think they are far too busy, but the way they think about what they have to do!

The major thing that I have noticed is that they don’t record, write down or capture what they are thinking they need to do. So it just runs round and round and round and round in their heads. They repeat the same list over and over again (often in a different order each time) giving the impression that they have much more to do than they actually have!!

So, the first thing you need to do is just write everything down. But let me just stress one thing: This isn’t about writing a “to do list”, at this stage all it is about capturing what you think you need to do.

Often, when I get clients to do this they cannot list anywhere near as much as they think they should be able to and will say thing like “I am sure I have more to do than that, I must have forgotten some stuff…”. This is rarely true and often you will find you have much less to do than you think you  need to.

Next time I will tell you what to do with that capture list!

Matt

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