The title of Richard Carlson’s book, ‘Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff’ always makes me smile. It reminds me of how easy it is to get distracted by little tasks and concerns which have the potential to blow our plans right off track, every time.
How many times have you sat down to do a piece of work which has loomed over you for days or even weeks and realised that your plants really needed watering? Or checked and replied to every single email in your inbox before getting down to any real work. Or what about all those hours on social media watching cats at the swing park, hilarious!!!
It can be so much easier to focus on these small things, to exaggerate their importance and impact until they loom over everything else. Somehow, the real ‘stuff’ we dream of, the plans and ambitions we thought were important are pushed further and further down the priority list while weeks and months race by.
And here we are in the middle of the year, already. Yes, that year, the one where you were going to move into your dream job and create that exciting new future. How’s that going for you? Let me guess, there really hasn’t been the time because there have been so many other, more urgent priorities?
I hate to talk in clichés, although that doesn’t ever stop me, but this is it. This is your precious one and only life, isn’t it time to stop setting those false timescales and postponing your ambitions? Trotting out those familiar platitudes, ‘I’ll move out of this job as soon as I’ve decided when I’m going on holiday” ‘I’m waiting till the children move up to secondary school after the summer, but wait, then it will nearly be Christmas and I always have so much to do then, better make it January’
January next year, isn’t that where we came in? Isn’t it always going to be January next year?
It’s time to prioritise that new job. Ignore the ‘small stuff ‘, the distractions. Make those phone calls, follow up on the interesting contacts you made at the last networking meeting you invested four hours of your time at. Make every day for the rest of this year count and move towards the job of your dreams.