Anxiety is caused by a lack of control, organization, preparation, and action.Getting Things Done by David Allen.
Since I have prioritized reading (once again) I have come across this quote.
I believe this is more actual than ever.
I talk to different business owners every week, and if I have to name one commonality among most of them, it is anxiety.
Anxiety can be caused by a million things.
- The moment you know you have received an invoice and the client is waiting for a response, but you're not at your computer.
- Constantly trying to remember the 3 things you need to get done today.
- The 6 projects you're managing at once but you can't remember what the next step is in all of them.
- Knowing there are potential clients you can close but don't act on them because of the friction to retrieve all past communications.
- Not knowing your financial situation
- Wondering whether your team is working on the highest priority things...
But even if the situations are different, most anxieties come from a lack of control, as David Allen says.
And this lack of control comes often in the form of keeping the information in our heads instead of on a computer or phone.
And the reason why we keep info in our heads usually falls into one of these:
- Either we don't consider it important enough to be written down
- Or we don't have an easy way to write it down AND rest assured we won't lose it and forget later.
The first one has an easy fix.
Everything that needs to get done and we can't do right away should be written down somewhere.
Our brains suck at remembering tasks. It excels at remembering feelings and sensations, but at remembering to-dos?!
Let's not trust this job to it.
Then the problem becomes whether we have a place where we can store to-dos and rest assured we'll see them later and won't forget.
Some time ago I created a video showing exactly how I go about doing this exact thing.
If you feel anxious and have near to no systems helping you, I would start with that video.
It is as simple as a system can get.
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