What do you do before the thing you want to achieve?
Imagine we are having a coaching session. This is one of the first questions I would ask you.
- Struggling to get up early in the morning? What do you do before you go to sleep?
- Struggling to focus on your tasks? What do you do before you start your tasks?
- Having challenges completing your projects? How do you start your projects?
When a chef cooks a meal, she would chop and lay out all the ingredients before actually cooking them.
Before an athlete competes, he follows a structured training plan.
Certain domains have more or less established practices how to get things done. For knowledge work, it is less so.
This is true for areas like:
- How we maintain focus
- How we plan our day / week / month…
- How we complete our tasks and projects
- How we manage our energy throughout the day
Here’s what to do when you are feeling stuck or face a challenge during the day:
Don’t look at the problem. Look at what happens before the problem even shows up.
Why do we do that?
Because everything we do during the day is related to each other. What we do before impacts the current and the current affects what we will do.
Because when we focus on the before, we smoothly transition to taking action. We create a level of momentum we otherwise won’t have.