lift-off

The shorter days and colder weather are dragging me down – and winter hasn’t even started yet!
When I feel this way, items can languish on my to-do list. With my handy-dandy Evernote app, I can move a task from Monday to Tuesday to Wednesday with a simple cut & paste.
But everywhere I go, there it is!
A hack that usually works to get me out of this push-forward rut is this:
Aim for mediocre.
You know that meme: Perfect is the enemy of good enough?
Well, if you’re in a productivity rut, don’t even think about perfection and maybe even think about ditching “good enough”.
Before you think I am talking about, say, my acceptable quality of baked goods, no, that’s not what I am talking about. I’m referring to GETTING STARTED when you’re stuck on a task.
Here is a recent example of when I tried this little chestnut and it worked.
For awhile I’ve had a vague but exceptionally good idea on my to-do list:
“Contact XY high-end-grocery about selling Sticky products”.
Prairie Girl sold cupcakes to XY for years because even though we had 5 locations, the stream of people going into this gourmet establishment meant that daily shipments to their store were a real opportunity for us.
So definitely a great idea for Sticky to explore.
But stopping me from crossing that item off my list were thoughts like this: what to write, who to write, would they reply, how much detail to mention and really wouldn’t it be best to have a solid proposal to send??
Like, maybe an Excel spreadsheet done up by Andrew.
And so it sat there on my list: “Contact XY high-end-grocery about selling Sticky products .”
A week or so ago I was so tired of seeing this item on my list that I pulled out the “aim for mediocre” hack: I Googled XY store and emailed them from the Contact page.
My email was something like, hey, I used to own PGB and now I own Sticky, maybe we could talk.
Something like that.
An hour later- maybe less? – a nice note came back – “Sure, let’s meet”.
So that led to me sending samples and then us meeting and now me working on a proposal for Sticky to be allocated part of their front-of-store bakery display.
So, yay. But my point is:
– My email was mediocre
– I decided on the contents of the sample pack so fast that I forgot to include banana pudding
– We went to the meeting without a fancy plan
AND NOW IT IS OFF MY TO-DO LIST
Sure, there is a lot more to do to bring this to an actual relationship between Sticky and XY but to me – and maybe to you- once a project has some back-and-forth and life to it, it is easy.
I’ve sent some ideas to the graphic designer and then those will go to the other business and they will say yes or change this or that…
The ball is rolling, there’s a little momentum.
So go for mediocre in lift-off: the game will never get started if you don’t.