• Hesitation: Do Anyway or Do Not?

    by Alexander Becker

    When in doubt, don't vs. Do exactly what you hesitate doing.

    There are two possible causes for hesitation. The one where you hesitate because you doubt the outcome and on the other hand the kind of hesitation where you are not sure about the way to tackle your job.

    The way is, once started, easily adjustable, but only when started. When the destination, the goal, is clear and you truly stand behind it, the actual way to achieve it is nothing to worry about.

    The outcome, in contrast, determines the way. If and when you hesitate, once you do hesitate, when the outcome is not desirable, when it feels like "it's not worth the effort," you can just as well leave it altogether. Don't even start.

    Grace is the absence of everything that indicates pain or difficulty, hesitation or incongruity. --William Hazlitt

    Similarly, if something doesn't work the exact way you expect it -- leave it alone.

    This is not blindly subscribing to fate, quite the opposite, the mere notion that something "shouldn't be" is enough to taint your commitment and it practically guarantees sub-optimal results. In which case, you can't do your best and -- just as well do nothing at all.

    One more reason to do instead of pondering doing or not --

    Live that moment as fast as you can and fill it with as much life as possible. Do not live it as if it was the last one, live it as if it was the only one.

    In other words, if it feels like a chore, if effortlessly isn't the best way to describe what you're up to, if procrastination is even an issue, please don't bother and step back, for others might just love doing what you so -- don't.

    When you're clear and positive about the outcome, do -- push through hesitation, whatever it takes and the way will pave itself for you. When you don't even know where to go, let alone like where you're going to be, when you ever so silently resist or reject the outcome, don't -- give in to hesitation, stay where you are and find another goal worth the effort.

    Determine which kind of hesitation you deal with, then decide about doing anyway or not doing at all.

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  • Follow Your Excellence

    by Alexander Becker

    Do only what you are good at. Even more, of the things you are good at, select those which you are best at. Spend as much time as possible working and applying your set of core skills.

    Persuade the people you work with of the enormous increase in efficiency if everyone was doing what they excel at. We are talking orders of magnitude here, even without exaggeration. The advantages almost present themselves: Incidentally, you work fast and most accurate when challenged at your level of expertise. In fact, the work you dismiss as too easy or as not challenging enough is not lesser work -- for you it is even harder than the most difficult jobs within your area of comfort.

    Delegate as much as possible of everything which does not fall into your core competency. It is not that you are too beautiful for any job, instead you are too busy accomplishing what only you can do, and what only you can do best.

    Install and ruthlessly defend flexible hierarchies of competence, wherever you are, for he who knows best or most is the boss -- this particular time, in his particular field. The result is dynamic leadership with true, original leaders, the capacities of their respective fields.

    Do what you are really good at. Delegate everything else. Outsource even the most basic tasks, actions, and processes as long as it helps you and frees time and resources to explore your excellence.

    Identify and analyze your stumbling blocks, the tasks where you always tend to procrastinate. This is not about overcoming procrastination, it is about eliminating the cause of procrastination once and for all. Tasks that make you procrastinate are the primary candidates for delegation and outsourcing. Tasks that feel even remotely annoying are likely to be delegated. Focus on your core skills and automatically get rid of procrastination.

    How many hours do you spend each day applying your most valuable talent? Two hours? Three? One? You work in the business of your choice, you create a dream job for yourself. Increase the number of excellence hours only slightly and compare your results after a while.

    When you feel like you don't even need sleep anymore, you are following your talent most appropriately.

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  • How to Motivate Yourself with One Word

    by Alexander Becker

    Your own word: give your word. If you are a person of honor and integrity, you know what it means to give your word.

    One method is emotional motivation, pumped up at seminars or at group meetings where the participants leave with that smile on their face, only to have their motivation literally fade away over time, another method is Steve Pavlina's "sans chest-pounding motivation for smart people," intellectual motivation with the main idea to always set unreasonably big and thus intellectually challenging goals.

    There are ends to achieve that are important and may be emotionally lit brightly and furthermore intellectually founded and held up by logical reasons and even some scientific evidence... Some goals, the really big ones, can't get enough motivational support to be pursued and focused on, no matter what.

    Give your word to someone in order to complete and deliver on the promise whatever it takes. There are not many events that would make an acceptable excuse for yourself showing up with empty hands.

    This goes beyond intellectual or emotional motivation. If it is promised, it has to be done. Motivation through honor.

    Now, if you develop a similar sense of integrity in dealing with yourself, you may give your word to yourself in order to accomplish any given task even after emotional or logical motivational means are not available for some reason. The emotional momentum may be long gone and logic is hard to employ under certain circumstances.

    It doesn't matter why exactly you have to do it, you gave your word and that is more than sufficient to change the world around the issue at hand.

    Develop that sense of integrity and give your word to guarantee that things get done. Just make sure to be absolutely convinced that you are not going to give up before the defined and promised goal is achieved. Do not give your word if you are not willing or able to invest whatever you have in order to succeed.

    The beauty of this approach is that you do not have to continuously invoke the whole array of "whys" and "what ifs" and "what if nots" in order to stay focused. Your word is a shortcut that let's you switch to autopilot and enables you to work without any doubts or any further questions on the current obsession.

    The phrase because I said so now takes on a completely new meaning.

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  • Matching Levels of Energy to the Tasks at Hand

    by Alexander Becker

    Time management is no rocket science. Do you work in accordance with your energy level at each moment? Anybody does this without even thinking about it but you can do it consciously and thus more effectively when deciding beforehand how energy-intensive the tasks are going to be and then mapping them across the day.

    In the morning, you may be calm and able to concentrate deeply, so why not shift your high-concentration tasks to the morning hours and do the easy, not peak-performance requiring jobs to the end of the workday where you can afford to work on autopilot?

    High-level planning for example, is often done best early in the morning, within a quiet hour or two.

    Levels of alertness are naturally depending on when and what you eat. Mind-taxing tasks that are due before lunch get automatically more high-quality attention than the after-lunch, digestion-influenced and impaired, heavily diverted focus, is able to provide.

    Another excellent time to function with maximum abilities is during the late evening, depending on when you go to sleep, the hours before crashing can be very productive when sensibly filled with the proper tasks.

    Monitor and lay out your personal energy map over the course of a typical workday and try to exchange the to dos according to your available mental and physical energy schedule.

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