The fashion debate has started up again in a massive way this month, thanks to Mary Portas in her Queen of Frocks show. Will anything change this time, now that the 14 million-or-so women over 40 who had resigned themselves to being invisible are suddenly realising the problem isn’t them?

I’m pretty typical of the issue: I’m 50 years old, and I’m size 16, or maybe even 18 – who knows;  my boobs have always been big, but now they occupy a small country. I’m not struggling with any significant emotional issues around my body, yet it’s been years since I could find anything I wanted to wear in the high street. I don’t bother shopping there any more. I rarely buy clothes at all. From what I’m hearing,  there’s a large chunk of that 14 million women who feel the same way. 14 million, retail people – are you listening? We should wave our wallets under their noses and say “Is there a recession? IS THERE? Breathe this in, sonny boy, it’s CASH.” They’ll rediscover our value so fast you’ll think they invented us.

The general message at the moment, though, seems to be “diet yourself into a size 10 and you too can have access to style” – but where do people get off telling me how to live, what to be? I’m 50 years old - I’ll scream it if you like – I don’t give a damn what a bunch of kiddies and skinnies think, whether they like my figure, whether they think I fit into their view of the world. The idea that I should mould myself against them is laughable – they think hyper-heels are A Good Thing, for heaven’s sake. I like older women to be larger – they then seem to have so much more presence than do the starving size 10-ers. Given that I think older women should be dominating UK life, keeping the Flies in order, that’s A Good Thing.

The funniest part of all this hand-wringing now is that it’s the Fashion Industry’s own promotions that are strangling this 14-million-strong market. 14 million – did I mention that?  They’re guilty of decades of telling us the Only Way is Youthful, using only flat-chested lanky schoolgirls as models, failing to explore what we want and how we live – making us feel so irrelevant to the world that we withdraw and live in big black t-shirts. Writing this I get annoyed all over again: how dim do they have to be? Perhaps they’re still under the impression that fashion is about the designer’s art, rather than about the end-user. The designer wants to find women who will make their pretty pictures look good, whereas I want a designer who makes ME look good. [Something, if you were watching Queen of Frocks Episode 2, Portas singularly failed to do, seeming to have a revulsion for real women's bodies.  She may be fighting the fashion industry, but only for skinny older women like her.]

Yet art isn’t only for flat girls. I’m constantly astonished at how uninspired is the fashion aimed at the older woman. Why does all creativity abruptly stop? I often see clothes that I like, fabulous pieces – but they’re designed for skinnies and aren’t cut correctly for my shape. I’ll keep saying it: you simply cannot design on a size 10 dummy, add some inches and think it’s going to work on my curves! When are they going to admit that the average cup size (particularly for the older figure) is far larger than a B cup? Did you know that very often the first time a size 16 is tested is when a customer takes it into the changing room? All insanity.

Well. I’m working on a plan – I don’t know how long it will take: I want to create a Style Show which is aimed firmly at the older woman. Not the shapeless, depressed, invisible women of people’s imaginations – but ones like me: the don’t-care, fun-loving, life-loving ones that are taking over society. I hope you’ll join us, the Visible Women.

Yeah, that’s me, the woman doing some laydee-wrapping on Channel 4′s Queen of Frocks this week. I’m one of the core focus-group women they recruited. Some of you may be wondering why on earth that would end up on a tv show about a shop makeover.  Here’s vaguely why.

The photo here is a duct-tape dummy I had made for myself a few weeks earlier, to help with my clothes-designing. The eagle-eyed amongst you will notice that I’m quite generously proportioned (a fabulous 43-32-43 to be precise), and it’s really the only way I can create designs that work for the curviness.

Do you know why designers like skinny models? Because 3-D design is hard!  It’s so much easier to draw pretty pictures on a pad and then find a flat female to hang them on. I’ve drawn some really pretty pictures, but they look crap on a 3-D human. Besides, designing for a real woman is so unfulfilling – you have to think about her and not yourself, and where is the fun in that?

Back to the dummy: I had to stand still for about 2 hours while my closer-than-she’d-ever-realised friend Immy wrapped me in short strips of duct tape. It’s not a process for the claustrophobic! Nor the bladder-challenged. I was desperate to go to the loo by the end – so much so that I had to do surgery on the dummy afterwards to remove a large part of the tummy…

Part of the art is in not squashing the flesh at all, in preserving the genuine shape and measurements. It would be tempting (oh so tempting) to run round and round with a roll of tape, cartoon-style, but unfortunately that doesn’t work. Though I may have to try it one day, just to check.

Boobs, obviously, are a special challenge, especially given that they will be the focus of all the designs afterwards.  At one point one of Immy’s friends turned up and we had a brief tape’age-a-trois around them. Which was nice.

[Quick note: no, I am not lesbian. I just suffer from a compulsion to make stupid jokes about myself. That's probably significant, but I can't be arsed to investigate it.]

So, being rather pleased with the outcome of Immy’s efforts, I suggested to the film team that they might get some made and use them as muses – and the next thing I knew I was being filmed doing the laydee-wrapping of poor patient Jane! Frankly, you can tell on the show that Immy was better at it than I was; though in my defence she wasn’t being filmed…

Anyway, having taped both dummies, cut them off, taped them back together, discovered that expanding insulation spray foam is a really, very really bad idea for filling them, chipped it all out again (having to dissect the dummy to do so), bought lots of foam crumb from a shop, had a foam crumb explosion all over my flat, persevered until I was almost crying…..they were both ready to be picked up in the morning by the taxi.

Unfortunately, in the morning I discovered that my one had exploded itself overnight, out of its back, and I had a desperate, slightly panicky struggle to re-tape and re-fill it while the taxi waited outside. I think there may have been actual sobbing on the message I left on Kate-my-filming-contact’s phone.

But…I managed it, and the taxi took the dummies the studio for Mary Portas to……admire. You can see just how much she admired them on the Queen of Frocks show, episode 1.

But what do I care? I’m busy creating works of genius for the curvaceous woman.

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A perfect example of missing your target market by miles.

It wasn’t obvious what was being promoted on this tv ad: an attractive young woman has managed to get her dress caught in the lift doors, and we’re afforded an excellent view of her underwear while the dress is being dragged up by the lift. The man in front of her is too busy collecting his dropped papers to notice and she manages to cover her confusion just in time.

So far, so funny. Gratuitous semi-nakedness of a rather tiresome kind, perhaps, but well-played.  The ad plays on: the woman is now at the watercooler laughing lustily with her friend about her mishap and then..oh dear!…she has accidentally peed her pants! Or so we assume, since we’ve now heard about the product and she’s making this rather odd ‘whoops!‘ gesture.

I actually held my hand out to shield myself from the tv, my recoil was so strong. It took me a moment to work out why, and then I realised it was the intense 1950s-style girlie coyness that nauseated me. That vacuous “Oops, I’m not very bright and I just inexplicably dropped my knickers‘ soft-porn look – wide-eyed with fingertips to mouth. Putting that together with incontinence is just…..wrong… Like a really misguided Golden Shower flick.

Which leaves the question ringing in the air: who on earth do they think they are talking to? Let’s just work this one through. It won’t take long.

It’s mostly men who will enjoy the semi-naked lady: as my Twitter friend Dan helpfully offered, “Peeing herself or not, she is pretty cute.” Thank you, Dan. I’m guessing it was a man who created this ad, but I’d challenge any man to use a pantie-liner effectively. Me, I’m not that interested at gazing at women’s bodies, shapely or otherwise. [And oh, god, can you stop forcing me to look at unshapely men's bodies? That's you, Boots]

So if not men, clearly women. Young women, apparently – I doubt either woman was over 25.  Do young women need incontinence pads? Well, I’d have to say, if I were launching a new incontinence pad I wouldn’t be putting machines for them in night-clubs. Bladder weakness usually comes from pelvic floor weakness, most likely as a result of childbirth or menopause. From the very generous view we got of her torso there was little sign of either on our girl. Perhaps she’s doing keigel exercises every day at yoga class.

Not absolute, of course – there will be a fair few women with bladder weakness after their first child, but that’s still not much of a market. The bulk of the market is going to be the older women, with both childbirth and menopause to deal with.

So here we are. The bulk of the market for these incontinence pads is probably women over 40 who have had children. Tena must know this. They’ve looked at the market stats and said “What do these women need to see, what are their aspirations?  These women who endured every scatological game their children played and who now wait for their husbands’ mid-life crises to play out?” And the answer came to them loud and clear: “What they want to see, what they want to be… is a shapely young woman acting like a 1950s soft-porn bimbo. Yes, by Jingo!”

Genius.

Well, there you go: I can never now buy these pads because I associate them with creepy male fantasies. I just have to hope my 10 years of free-weight squats will pay off.  Now – you create an advert that has a dozen female SAS soldiers and the sergeant is handing out incontinence pant-liners, saying “Load these properly, now – there ain’t nuthin’ cute about peeing yourself, ladies” – that would make me laugh. That, if I should need them, would definitely make me buy.

Update 19/6: I’m firmly told that “Light loss of urine when laughing or sporting has nothing to do with age.” Very true – we’ve probably all done it at least once, else there wouldn’t be the expression “peed myself laughing.” But with ordinary pantie-liners in common use I think Tena are delusional to think there’s a youth market. Perhaps they’re trying to create a new inferiority-complex in young women, on a par with Dove’s assertion that we should be worrying about soft armpits.

There’s a new way of earning money through creating high-quality internet content. I think it’s a winner.

Where it starts

So, one day I’m reading a top-class article online, and a rush of wild generosity bursts over me:

‘I wish there were an easy way to donate, say 20p, for an online article enjoyed, much as you would click a Facebook Like button.‘

I tweet this – obviously – and get immediate replies about two options: Tip The Web and Flattr. I look at both, quickly discount Flattr, and focus on Tip The Web. That’s where it starts.

At the time Tip The Web was still in development, so I had to wait. Now, though, it’s in Beta. It’s looking good, and I want everyone to see its brilliance – and its significance.

The current situation – not so good

To understand its importance not only as a new business model but – potentially – a new internet culture, we need to remember what we want from the internet. Me, I want an internet full of well-developed, well-presented content, and I’m guessing that most people would like the same. There may be those who just want a whole bunch of suckers sitting clicking, buying their worthless goods, but this isn’t for them. I’m talking to those who value quality.

What do we have at the moment? Some bright spots of wonderful articles and videos, for sure – but also a wasteland of sites plastered with adverts, locked subscription sites and, dotted here and there, sweetly-hopeful Donate buttons.

Maybe the adverts work for the site owner. Maybe the subscriptions do. I’m pretty sure the Donate buttons don’t.  Regardless, I have big issues with them all in terms of internet quality for the visitor.

1. Adverts: nothing wrong with them per se, but when it’s a struggle to find the content – or they haven’t even bothered with words beyond google-bait – then the goal has slipped from informing to pimping. It’s just ugly.
2. Subscription: we’re paying for everything, when we may only want a few things – and we’re paying regardless of the quality of the product. I abandoned my expensive FT subscription when the vague writing, coupled with how few articles I needed, meant it just wasn’t worth the money.
3. Pay-to-view: first cousin to the subscription model, this requires you to pay for an article based on a few short preview sentences. I don’t mind paying for things – I just don’t like playing Pin The Tail On The Donkey.  I’ve wasted a lot of money that way.
4. Donate: this is a nice idea for services, but something of a mallet for content.  How many people will like an article so much that they’ll ignore all other distractions and go through the Paypal rigmarole? Would you really pay £5 for the pleasure of reading it? Would you really use Paypal for 20p or 20¢?

In summary, none of these encourage high quality content, and some actively militate against it. We need a different approach – one which specifically rewards quality, relevance and timeliness. So, just in time, here is Tip The Web.

What Tip The Web brings to the game

What Tip The Web brings is a new way to reward good content on the internet. It will work because it is instant, it is cheap and it is specific -  and so it plays out the visitor’s generous impulse with no interruption and no dilution.

It couldn’t really be more simple: having seen something you like , you click the TIP button, select an amount – 5¢ to $2 or more – and click.  Three clicks, three seconds, all without leaving the current page.

If you’re thinking that with an ‘Everything For Free’ mentality, no-one will tip, I think that isn’t true.  People may not want to pay out large amounts of money, especially for something unseen and untested, but this act of tipping provides a small glow of virtue and the sense that your money is going to exactly the right place.  The amounts are small, but could add up to something significant when your writing improves and attracts a wider readership. You can see the articles I have tipped lately in the footer of this site.

What does this mean for the internet?

It means that in order to attract tips, and with this instant feedback of how people value a particular piece of creativity, the creator’s mind will be bent towards the reader and how the reader thinks, rather than himself and his own thought-processes. The intention shifts from self-expression to communication. There’s a thought.

(From my experience in this article alone I can tell you that this mind-bending has almost induced cramp… It is fantastically – and unexpectedly – educational! )

Where does it go from here?

Eric Ferraiuolo tells me that their version 2 will be a lot more social, with clever ways of looking at the information. You can already see the tips I’ve recently made (in the footer), and in the next version I’ll be displaying all the things of mine that are being tipped, from tweets to photos.

But even now my mind is crunching all the ways it could be used:

That’s just a start – I’d love to hear about more ways it could be used. As I said, I’m quite excited about this new model… Sign up today, tip something, and start telling people it’s here!

Links

Tip The Web – Site
Tip The Web – Twitter
Eric Ferraiuolo (TTW developer) – Twitter
Dave Fogel (TTW developer) – Twitter

This might start to explain quite a lot. Or…nothing whatsoever. Definitely one of those.

I always wish people would put something about themselves on their sites, but everyone is so concerned about looking professional that they cut out every last trace of humanity. ‘Look at me, I am a walking corporation, press here to fax me.’

For many people,the solution could well be incredibly simple.

It’s all about your internal whiteboard.

In association with Seeing Spells Achieving

Original artwork by x-mechanical-heart-x

Spelling: not so tricky at all

A difficulty in spelling, reading and remembering may be no more than a visual skill that needs practice and/or refinement. In that case it would take only a very few hours to bring the skill up to par. It probably is not, contrary to what your psychological assessment may seem to imply, a permanent defect in cognitive processing.

That is the premise of the Seeing Spells Achieving approach; one which I have used very successfully on my own clients. Usually, grasping the new visual concept takes about 20 minutes, and the rest is just expansion on a theme. I won’t claim it will work in every single case, but I am absolutely convinced that the vast majority will succeed.

See the proof all around you

Watch a good speller as they try to recall a spelling. Almost all will look upwards, because what they’re doing is reading off the letters in their heads. They’re probably not aware that they’re doing it, because they’ve always done it. Ask them to spell a fairly short word backwards, like gate or cream and watch their eyes – it’s quite funny…

To contrast, watch a poor speller – they are quite likely either to be looking to the side (running some big-elephants-can-always-use-some-eggs bizarre mnemonic, or down at the ground, probably feeling stressed. Some, curiously, will look up – perhaps looking for a spelling that has never been entered onto the system.

You, if you’re struggling, may have missed out on this visual trick for a dozen reasons; but it is quite unlikely you can’t do it once you know how. It’s the ‘knowing how’ that can be the challenge, when you’ve never done it before: which is where the SSA trainers come in.

Case Study: A teenager

I was working with a teenager on her spelling, and she was making terrific progress. I was so pleased with us both that I suggested we try a really hard word. “How about mediterranean?, I said, a little smugly. She nodded obediently…and then I stopped dead in some horror, as I realised I didn’t actually know how to spell it myself. That was a fun few seconds.

Luckily, the SENCO did, so I wrote it down and we started work. In a few minutes we were both able to spell it forwards and backwards.

What it all means

What’s the point of this story? It shows that spelling isn’t some magical talent: I’d never put the spelling in my head, so I couldn’t spell it, beyond some intelligent guesswork based on long experience.  Once we’d worked on it, though, we both were able to learn it. And, we were both able to spell it backwards (which is always the proof that one has planted it on one’s internal whiteboard successfully).

This, by the way, doesn’t just apply to ‘official’ dyslexics, so don’t worry about whether you have been diagnosed or not. Anyone can improve their spelling.

Case Study: Bs and Ds

Amrit was an 18-year-old lad from Pakistan who had been brought to his UK relatives by his mother in the hope of finding someone who could help him with his severe dyslexia. They happened upon my website and came to see me.

Amrit’s main challenge was that he couldn’t tell the difference between ‘b’ and ‘d’, and the words and letters would tend to move around for him. His spelling was very poor and inconsistent. He was subdued, having underperformed badly at school. His psychologist’s report said that he had little or no short term memory.

I showed him very quickly that there was nothing mechanically wrong with his mind: he could visualise exactly as required. The next step was to give him control over the movement of the letters and words. Some people are so talented at 3-dimensional thinking that their response to a 2-D unknown word is to try to see round the back of it. These people, if you ask them to imagine a cat sitting on a mantelpiece, might well see several versions of the cat, from all directions. Small wonder, then, that the words and letters move around.

I used a visualisation exercise that allowed him to channel his 3-D thinking down to one hand, and use the other hand for absolutely flat, unmoving 2-D text. If this sounds a little odd to you, consider how odd it is for a brain to make the flat and unmoving into writhing and escaping. It is his brain that is making it move, and it is his brain that will keep it still.

Amrit quickly found that by ‘thinking’ through this hand, he could keep the letters still. We could now deal with his ‘b’ and ‘d’ confusion: before, they had just flapped in either direction, becoming indistinguishable. We practised a little in the session, but it was his mother who sat him down at home and took him through dozens of b/d spellings. The next week they returned and his mother asked to show me something.

She opened up a file containing Amrit’s spelling tests and scores. Lo-o-o-ng sheets of spellings. The first was covered with corrections, and I felt a little downcast. But she continued to the second page, which had maybe half-a-dozen corrections. This was very encouraging. She smiled and turned to the third page: every single one was correct. Amrit was now under full control of his vision. The first sheet of errors had been because although he could now distinguish between ‘b’ and ‘d’, he still had to visualise them for his internal whiteboard.

The rest of the training followed the regular process of visualisations, and at the end of the 5th week there really was nothing more to do; it was now simply a case of playing catch-up.

I received an email from his mother (and a wonderful piece of art from him): she said that he had found a whole new confidence; that when we was with the educational counsellors he no longer sat there miserable, but boldly stated his situation and needs. He’s a lovely chap and I heard recently that he has started college!

So, from intellectual no-hoper to college student in a very short time! Here’s the beautiful picture he sent me when he got back home, based on the NLP exercises and visualisations we’d been doing.  When I asked him to put someone on the other side of the river to encourage him across, he put me…

There’s no real mystery about why some people are lucky and get the opportunities.

It’s also not that hard to get some for yourself.

What is luck, anyway?

Is luck some kind ofcosmic gift – something you’re either given or denied? Or is it something you generate yourself?

I’m not talking about the £100k bag of banknotes that falls into your garden from a passing plane. Nor the plane that falls onto your house. Those are just too rare to be considered (except by the airline, perhaps…).

No. I’ve watched a great many people in action, in my various (but overlapping) roles as strategist, project manager and shoulder/therapist/coach, and I am absolutely certain that it is self-created or – just as frequently – self-destroyed. For me, luck is opportunity, and opportunity is something you can create for yourself, if you know how.

Usually it’s the knowing how that’s the problem, since neither lucky nor unlucky people really know what they’re doing right or wrong, and if asked will give you cliches for answers.

What luck looks like

(in case it’s been so long you’ve forgotten…)

Someone ringing you out of the blue saying “we need your services, today”; meeting the partner of your dreams at that drycleaners you don’t usually use; having that ‘eureka’ moment for an idea as you gaze at a pile of printer cables; discovering your partner is a con-artist just before you sign the contract (rather than just after!); hearing before anyone else about some amazing offices that are about to go on sale for a song; discovering that the plan that just collapsed has opened the way to something far more interesting.

A quick guide to opportunity

Here’s an outline of the things that are vital for luck. Where are you on the scale?

Goals and Plans: these don’t have to be Uber-Goals, where your life is devoted entirely to achieving them; they can simply be a clear direction. Enough to mean that your antennae (see Creativity) have something to report back to.

If you don’t know where you’re going and how to get there, then you have no way of identifying an opportunity, even if it lands by your feet. You know how when you’re looking for something in the cupboard and you just can’t see it – until you remember that it’s blue and flat, not red and boxy? It’s the same thing.

Connections: very good things can come from an extended and nurtured network. If you sit on your sofa all day and shun human contact, you can probably see that the chances of that out-of-the-blue offer are low.

Further, connections are not just lists of names: how well do you understand your connections’ offerings and needs? Do they really know yours? If they are to recommend you to others, they need to be able to articulate exactly what it is you are selling.

Creativity: this is the ability to spot opportunity amongst apparently unconnected information, and see the new opportunity created by disaster (some people manage to get rich in a credit crunch…). It’s also the habit of constantly exploring new zones and new information, with your antennae pricked for relevance to your goals. If you keep your mind firmly on the one track, all you’ll see is more track.

Emotional stability: this underpins everything else, so that your mind is free to perform and attract, instead of self-sabotaging and repelling. Part of this, of course, is attitude: seeing the positive in events and the new opportunities, instead of relentlessly seeing only the negative. You’ve all met people who are their own worst enemies: alienating everyone they meet, ignoring big red warning flags and avoiding responsibility for their lives and decisions. They’re not opportunity-generators, they’re bad-luckniks.

Back to you

When it’s written down like this, it all looks a bit obvious; but consider your own efforts in each area – how are you actually doing? An imbalance in any of these areas could be hindering you quite seriously, but it’s easily changed.  All of these have training available for them in one form or another. This time next year you could be the luckiest person you know.

It helps if you know what you’re trying to achieve and why.

It helps even more if you’re creative about getting there.

• expanding massively your ideas about what could be achieved and how
• knowing clearly your idea and niche
• determining which version of it is feasible
• planning how to achieve it effectively

Sometimes, though, it’s more effective to define something in terms of what happens when it’s missing. Below are some reasons businesses failed, showing what may well happen with a lack of planning. They:

• hadn’t stepped out of their habitual thinking, so the idea was limited and pedestrian – inspiring nobody and failing to exploit their own talents, the economic climate, new technology, changing attitudes or serendipity.
• hadn’t clarified the concept – so they found it difficult to persuade others of it; it created confusion amongst partners; and they kept on sliding away from the original idea onto new shiny things
• didn’t know how they were going to make money from it; or they were following a fantasy about what people would pay good money for
• had done little or no research into their competition or their hoped-for niche – so the looked-for sales didn’t happen
• lacked a clear set of tasks to achieve the objectives – so progress was slow and untickable, things were missed and motivation slumped
• had no contingency plans for likely obstacles – so that progress halted, motivation slumped and money was wasted
  

  Original artwork by inopoke

I’m guessing that most people don’t do the planning either because they don’t know how, or because they’re running some “If I look, I may discover my baby is defective” script in their head.

So, here’s your first mission – to discover that planning your start-up or business remodelling is not only within your ability and time well-invested, but also creatively absorbing and mind-expanding. Enjoyable!

Some business strategy elements

Below are two elements which start to clarify your idea:

Mission Statement (or Business Purpose)

Much bandied about, and often confused with a strapline or some other promotional schmooze. It isn’t – it’s your guiding principle, the gap that you’re filling, the crystal clear limits of your current ambition. All in one or two perfect sentences.

The curse of the moving target by vanoostzanen

Without a mission statement you may find you’re trying to nail a moving target, with the result that nothing is really addressed properly. Try moving into a house when the walls keep shifting, rooms appear and disappear, and none of the flooring has been laid properly as a result.

Further, a mission statement means you and your partners all agree on what you’re trying to do. If one partner thinks you’re opening Aldi, another thinks you’re opening Waitrose, and a third thinks you’re opening Harrods Food Hall, you have some bad decisions coming up.

Lastly, a mission statement is the ‘what’, not the ‘how’, so it offers the opportunity to get highly creative about how you deliver the results. Part of the strategic process will be to explore ways it can be satisfied and choose the most suitable.

Vision Statement (or Business Aspiration)

Mission and Vision are not the same thing. Mission explains your reason for being, the gap you’re filling; while Vision describes how it will look at maturity, in all its glory, worshipped by your customers.

It can be something of an iterative process with mission statement, because people will often get sidetracked away from their purpose. This is where you start to see the value of the mission statement in keeping you focused – or where you realise the mission statement isn’t what you meant at all.

Comparing the two is a necessary step because, before you know it, what started as a ‘local information provision’ has morphed into an ‘international membership concierge’. There’s nothing wrong with that per se, but it serves an entirely different purpose from the one that originally inspired you, and probably isn’t compatible. You’ve just stopped yourself from trying to run down two tracks at the same time.

Summary: approaching your tasks a little differently can allow you to use your time far more effectively.

The Problem

How do you approach your day?  Do you feel you’re getting the most out of your hours, or are you just moving about all day without really progressing? I get so annoyed with myself when I let that happen – it means I’ve been frittering time on things I dislike, when I could have been spending it on looking at expensive shoes.

So.  Most people make the big, big mistake of just starting something without thought and persisting until it’s finished, before moving on to the next task. Come to that, a lot of people start whole businesses like that, but that’s another article.

This ‘just start’ approach can be ineffective for several reasons:

• there’s no overview of the task, to find the fastest or most productive way of doing it
• people can only maintain focus on an uninteresting task for a short while.  Much of the time spent on the task will actually be spent either daydreaming or remembering something vital to be Googled
• often you may not get to the task at all, because its size is so daunting or you’re experiencing ‘tasker’s block’ (see A few dozen reasons to procrastinate)
• that one task may end up crowding out other equally vital tasks, which need at least a start made on them.

The Method

If you recognise any of those, then it’s time to try something new. Find yourself some kind of alarm timer which is very easy to set. You can get good ones with minutes and seconds for under £10 at big supermarkets (make sure it has big numerals).

1. Decide how many hours you will work before you stop (this also avoids the problem of forgetting to stop – the curse of those who work at home)
2. List all of the things you need to achieve by the end of the day
3. If your work is the kind to have interruptions, add in an Interruptions task of the amount of time you think is lost on it (just to count it in)
4. Don’t forget lunch. Eating and a break of some kind are an important part of your day
5. Assign the amount of time to each task you think it needs or are obliged to give it. If some could be carried out at the same time (e.g. Bank and Shops), consider including them as one.
6. If you have tasks you loathe or which are trivial, try assigning just 15 minutes or less to them (I’ve resorted to 1-minute tasks before to crack my resistance), and approach them as a time-challenge.
7. Count how many hours it adds up to, then adjust the times to fit into the time available, proportionally. That is, if you have 8 hours available, but 12 hours of tasks, reduce it all by a third. If the total time is absurdly large, consider losing a task or two; else stick with the times you assigned.

From here you can go one of two ways, according to the day and the nature of the task:

• Pick your first task and set the timer for the time you gave it. Think 80/20: what action on the task will produce the greatest results in the time available?

- or -

• Pick your first task and set the timer for a short period (I usually set it for 30 or 15 minutes). What action on the task will produce the greatest results in that time? When time is up, put the task aside and turn to the next. Rotate your task attention, giving a task only as much time as you assigned to it.

It may well not go perfectly – life is rarely so smooth – but don’t abandon it if so: if you manage only a few tasks this way, you will still have made progress.

Even More Advantages

Now, what are the added advantages of doing it this way?

1. It forces you to accept that you have a limited amount of time available to you, and that if you can’t make time expand, you’ll have to make the tasks either shrink or disappear
2. It makes you work so much faster! Although you may be appalled at trying to work on some of your tasks in just 15 minutes, you’ll be amazed at how much you achieve
3. It breaks down a lot of resistance, because the commitment is so short
4. Working in restricted slots like this forces you to put aside a task before it is wholly finished. This gives you fresh eyes when you come back to it, and you’ll probably find your unconscious has been cranking away on it in the meantime, giving you new insights
5. Moving from task to task keeps you feeling fresher throughout the day

The value of this approach will probably become clearest when you stop using it for any reason. I know that when I forget to use it, my whole day goes to pot!

Good luck!  I hope I’ve found you some more time to look at expensive shoes. Or cars. Or chocolate..mmmm, chocolate…

Penelope

Summary: Procrastination is usually about fear, so “pull yourself together” self-talk has no effect. Here’s a practical exercise to convert procrastination into can’t-stop-myself enthusiasm.

If there’s one thing that’ll kill a small business, it’s faffing about. I groan to my ankles, though, when I read articles which say “you should do this, and this, and that to sort yourself out.” Trite as hell: we all know what we should be doing, and if we could only make ourselves do it, we’d be doing it already, thank you.

Sometimes the fear is big enough that we won’t even risk examining it, in case we walk smack into The Danger by mistake. Ah, the joys of being so evolved.

I’m trying a different approach, then: one which sneaks around the back door while you’re having a cup of tea and a nice chat in the sitting room, and does all the washing up for you.

The challenge for you here is to try to stay on the (metaphorical) sofa as long as possible while doing this exercise. Once you learn the ropes, it can become an automatic, routine mental check.

The Exercise
Looking at the case studies (Steve’s Contract, The Writer) after you’ve read this will help you to see how it pans out in practice.

1. Promise yourself that you absolutely WILL NOT make yourself do anything at the end of this exercise. We need your Inner Toddler (No! Won’t!) to be a willing participant, so you’re…just playing…with ideas.

2. Find yourself a pad and pencil, which will allow you to be both coach and client. It really does make a difference: it stops your mind wandering.

3. Write down what objective this task supports. Give yourself a brief mental picture of the outcome (e.g. efficient office, freedom from tax-man, new business opportunities, well-defined goal & strategy).

4. Write down this question on the pad: “What does not-doing [the task] protect me from?”

5. Notice any rumblings of resistance, physical feelings or sudden deep breaths as you consider the question – they’ll help you to locate the answers. For more ideas, take a look at the list in A Few Dozen Reasons To Procrastinate.

6. Write down all the answers without self-censorship. A lot of the answers may be very sensible, but if you’re finding any of them embarrassing, have compassion for your Inner Toddler… Besides, no-one else’s answers are going to be any more mature.

7. Then ask yourself: “What would make it safe to do [the task], even though there is [the issue]?” and write down the answer. Try to stay on-target: if you suddenly realise the answer is to redecorate the office, make a note of that need, but still answer the safety question.

8. Keep asking the ‘safe’ questions to cover all aspects of the situation, all issues (particularly in terms of it not going perfectly well), until you feel you have reached, and made safe, the nub of the problem. The fears and practicalities have been honoured and catered for. You feel relaxed, with no rumblings of resistance.

9. Now discuss with yourself (still writing it all down) what would make it fantastic to do [the task]: really remember the benefits of finishing the task and achieving the objective. See that mental picture again, get right into it, with full feelings attached. This is why it’s worth doing, why it was on your list.

10. I was going to say here “Go to it”, but in fact you’ll probably find you’ve started without even trying!

If you get stuck with this, it may help to get a friend to play ‘coach’. If it really starts to look like a complicated issue, then that’s where the professionals come in – they’re skilled in asking the right questions.

Penelope Else

Related posts:
A few dozen reasons to procrastinate

Procrastination case study: The Writer

Procrastination case study: Steve’s Contract