“We Can Do Anything But We Can’t Do Everything”
— Author Unknown
With a car and four hours, you can drive from New York to Boston. Or you can drive from New York to DC. But you can’t do both.
You’re smart enough to write a marketing plan in one week. Or renegotiate a large contract. Or do performance reviews for all of your direct reports. But you can’t do all three.
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Ability is not the same as capacity!
“If I have a clear set of tasks to do, a big cup of coffee in the morning is a great productivity-enhancer. I get straight to work and stay focused for hours. But if I don’t have a clear set of tasks in mind before I have the coffee, I’m just wired and rudderless.”
— Anonymous Reader
There’s often an order to doing things. We ADHDexecs have spent many years ignoring the steps and sometimes that’s fine. But sometimes we really need to know the 1, 2, 3…
Assembling “a clear set of tasks” can be hard if you’re working on a big, complex project. In fact, it’s impossible to write your whole list of tasks! So break it down. A day’s worth if you can do it. Or a half-day’s worth. Or half-hour‘s worth. Whatever you can do — as long as it’s steering first, gas second.
A colleague asked me to join his new side project. “It’ll be interesting,” he said. “The results will be useful,” he said. “It won’t take much time,” he said.
