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The sol­id grip on structure

You decide to get a han­dle on how you struc­ture your work. It’s some­thing you read, some­thing you hear, some­thing you see that sparks the cru­cial moti­va­tion. ​“This!” you think. ​“This I can do! This will make a difference!”

So, you get start­ed. You feel inspired. You cre­ate new, smart­ly named fold­ers, begin build­ing a hier­ar­chi­cal tree that maps out every­thing you’re work­ing on, and come up with a bet­ter way to do some­thing you do often. You make some progress, but then – some­thing urgent hap­pens that you need to pri­or­i­tize instead. You plan to con­tin­ue struc­tur­ing lat­er, but once the first fire is put out, a new one flares up elsewhere.

The morale-drain­ing setback

You fall more and more behind and feel increas­ing­ly dis­cour­aged. The half-fin­ished, not ful­ly imple­ment­ed struc­ture cre­ates more con­fu­sion than order. You resign your­self to think­ing you’re ​“hope­less.”

You’re wrong – of course.

Do this

When you can’t man­age the big struc­tur­al over­haul you set out to do, think: ​“Less.”

• Make a small­er change than you ini­tial­ly attempted.
• Define few­er actions than you thought you’d have time for.
• Break your struc­ture-build­ing into small­er steps than before. If you’ve out­lined a struc­ture improve­ment project, these are the to-dos it con­sists of. Make them short­er in terms of time required.

You know what – shrink all of the above even more. If you’re one of us who tends to take on too much, chances are high you’ve over­es­ti­mat­ed how much you’ll even man­age of this ​“less.” What mat­ters now is mak­ing it easy for your­self to move for­ward toward a bet­ter struc­ture and a less stress­ful dai­ly life.

Suc­ceed more easily

If you take a small­er struc­tur­al step than the one you failed with, your chances of suc­cess increase this time. Bit by bit, you’ll gain more con­trol over your work sit­u­a­tion as your struc­ture becomes more aligned with how you want it to be.

How do you go about it?

What’s the small­er struc­tur­al step you want to take next? Please write and tell me. Per­haps I can offer a help­ful word. Maybe I can sug­gest a tool or method that would make things eas­i­er for you.

(Feel like you need to get a bet­ter grip over your time? Have you tried to com­pose your ide­al week?)