The Best Advantage You Can Give Yourself
Doing what you say you’re going to do when you say you’re going to do it is the single biggest advantage that you can give yourself.
Keep your commitments to your team, your clients, your family, for anyone or everyone that matters to you. Keeping your commitments to yourself is most important of all.
It's such a huge opportunity and advantage because so many people don't do it.
So many things get forgotten. Small things, big things, and all shapes and sizes of stuff in-between.
The calls that don't get made, the email that isn't sent. That thing that you needed for your client that could have been delivered the following day if you'd remembered to order it when you first thought about it three weeks ago. But you got distracted by something else and it didn't happen.
Sometimes things like this cost you money straight away. Most of the time though, the cost is trust. No trust means no sales, no clients, no repeat business, and no referrals. In the long run that can be very expensive.
Missed commitments cause stress, frustration, wasted time, guilt, and a few other unpleasant things. All completely unnecessary and avoidable.
Your mind was designed for thinking not for remembering.
Here’s the trick. It's impossible to keep your commitments if you’re trying to keep track of everything in your head. There are too many moving parts, too much complexity, too much nuance, and too much change to be able to do that.
We all use some form of calendar and address book every day but most of us don’t stop to think about why. The simple reason is that whilst the mind evolved as a great thinking machine, it’s not that good as a remembering machine.
Let’s say that you have around 500 contacts in your address book, each with at least a name, phone number, and email. That gives you about 1500 pieces of information.
It’s the same with your calendar. Dates, times, places. If you stopped to work it out you could have thousands of different bits of data in there.
Everything is arranged so you can find what you want when you want it, and you can edit any discrete part any time you need to do that.
Now imagine that when you wake up in the morning your diary and your contacts have disappeared. Everything's been deleted. They're completely blank. Now imagine the panic when you find out that your only backup has failed and everything has gone.
Forever.
If you want to take it up a notch, imagine that you'll never be able to get use an app or even pen and paper for your diary or contacts ever again. You'll have to try and remember it all.
It's stressful and exhausting just contemplating it, let alone trying to do it.
Let's get back to your commitments. Everything that you want to get done.
You might not know it, but you could have upwards of 100 projects on the go right now. Each one could have 10 to 20 different parts to complete before you can mark the project off as done. You might complete a project in a day or it might take a year.
That’s somewhere between 1000 and 2000 individual actions to get done. Or if you enjoy spending time in the kitchen, all the recipes in a medium-sized cookery book. That's a lot to try and remember. And I don't know about you, but that doesn't sound very appealing.
There's an app for that.
"If I write down fifteen things to be done, I lose that vague, nagging sense that there are an overwhelming number of things to be done, all of which are on the brink of being forgotten."
Mary Roach
So if you don't already have a system for managing, organising, editing, and arranging those 1000+ pieces that's as bullet-proof, reliable, and easy to use as the contacts and calendar app on your phone, and reminds you of deadlines far enough in advance for you to do something about it, then you need to get one. Fast.*
The alternative is to have all these things rattling around your head. And whilst you're trying to keep track of everything you have to do, you're keeping your fingers permanently crossed that you won't let any of the plates that you're juggling every day fall to the floor and smash into a thousand tiny pieces.
That's when plates and commitments both get broken.
(*Paper can work just as well as an app.)
If this post hit close to home, then you might want to check out "Sorry, I forgot..."