Pacing Yourself Accordingly

Ok, I don’t really want to be one of those stupid people who say, “We’re two weeks into 2018, only 50 more weeks in the year!  Are you on track to meet your goals?”  But let’s be honest, time has a tendency to slip away from us when we’re not paying attention or tracking out progress regularly.

If your business is a side hustle, this can be especially true – I know it is for me.

How do I know?  Because this morning at a cafe while I was eating breakfast, the young waitress who brought me my coffee pleasantly reminded me that there were only 350 days left in 2018.

At first, I laughed, but then I started thinking about it and she was right.

I tend not to be one of those people that gets neurotic about time, I figure that I’ll just create an outline for myself and step through the objectives on my outline which will ultimately get me to my desired outcome.

Until it doesn’t …

Because despite my best of intentions, I occasionally don’t get everything I want to do actually finished.

I know, I know… You’re sitting there saying, “Shut up, Sean, you’re telling lies.”

As hard as it is to believe, I sometimes fall behind and miss my self-imposed deadlines.  It might be that I got busy with something else or that another issue popped up and I didn’t have the time I thought I would.  It might even be that I started watching something on Netflix and just decided that I deserved some TV time.

I’m not a slave to my schedule and that’s a freedom that I think I’ve earned.

Sorry, but I’m going to go off on a wild tangent here…

This past weekend, I said to my wife that I could never seem to find a glass when I wanted a drink and that either our son was hiding them in his room like a squirrel burying nuts for winter or we’d just broken so many that we were running out.
She assured me that it was the latter and we decided to buy some new glasses.

I have to say, these new glasses she picked out are absolutely magnificent.  They are an excellent size from a height perspective – big without being grotesquely large.  They have an exceptional circumference to them and as a result of those two factors, the volume of water that they hold is fantastic without the glass being “too much”.  It’s not like one of those stupid Big Gulp containers or anything, it’s elegant but voluminous.

Alright, enough about my drinking glass, where was I?

Right, I own my schedule, it doesn’t own me.

This is a really important factor for people who have a job or other commitments like looking after kids and running a household.  Those things do consume a large portion of your time so if you allow yourself to become a slave to your side hustle schedule, then you’ll inevitably end up resenting it when you miss your overbearing self-imposed deadlines.

And that totally sounds like I’m giving you (and myself) a free pass to be slack.

Not true and that’s kind of the point of this post.

While I’m a big believer in giving yourself a free pass every once in awhile, I think it’s important that you do try and keep to a regular delivery schedule.  Otherwise, the year vanishes and you find yourself in July having accomplished almost nothing of your plan for the year.

That’s when compromise sets in and you start justifying why you won’t do things.

Steady progress is important.

One of the things I committed to doing was getting my daily emails up onto Casual Marketer blog – I had a backlog of about 600 emails that hadn’t been posted.  I published about 200 more last week and have documented the Standard Operating Procedure to publish a post for a VA to go through and start doing that backlog.  It will probably take four or five months for them to do it, but I’m making steady, measurable progress.

That’s what you need to do – chip away at your objectives.  Break them down into bite-sized chunks of deliverable effort and do a little bit each day.

Just keep making progress and you won’t be sitting there halfway through the year wondering where the heck the time has gone.

Remember, you’ve only got 350 days left in this year so make the most of it!

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