Three weeks ago, starting a road trip from Toronto, I flew out from a city that was still brown and bruised from Winter. Toronto – one of the very best cities in the world in my humble opinion- is not sadly a beautiful city, and never less so than when crawling out from Winter’s snare.

When I finally got home – released from the grip of an Icelandic volcano – the city was transformed. Tulips and daffodils in the front yard, green grass everywhere, and the disturbingly pale legs of Torontonians in shorts.

So it’s that time of year again, a time for Spring Cleaning. Not just the obvious stuff, the junk in the spare room or garage. It’s time to tackle all the ways and whys and whats that have ended up in all nooks and crannies of your life. This is a time for a brisk combination of elimination and upgrade. Decide what’s superfluous, and discard. Figure out what you care about, and burnish it back to life.

Starting with boundaries

Boundaries just may be the secret of success to this, and you’ll see that many of the tactics below involve setting a limitation. That might sound contradictory from someone whose personal mission is “to infect a billion people with the possibility virus,” but I think the tension between growing possibilities and forcing choice is what creates a mindful and bold life.

Or put it another way, and to come back to this essential Great Work mantra:

I have no more room for Yes

I have no more room for Yes.

I have no more room for Yes.

I will get bolder with my No

So I can welcome back my Yes.

Focus

Jim Collins seems to have a 9th Dan Black Belt in Focus. He’s got some superb strategies that are beyond my abilities – for instance, having nothing to do with electronics before lunch, limiting a client to 4 days of his time per year, or carrying a stopwatch around to measure exactly how much time he spends on his critical projects.

But I’m getting better too, and here’s how.

1. Map the year

I’m totally enamored by the planning tools of Charlie Gilkey of Productive Flourishing. It’s a simple paper-based process that allows me to define my goals for the year, for the quarter, for the month and for the week. I don’t actually use the week planning process, but setting out my goals for the quarter and the month stops them becoming a train crash in my head.

(By the way, Charlie and I are doing a teleclass together on Thursday June 17 at 1pm Eastern. Details to follow, but you might want to hold the day and time for now.)

2. One plus two

I mention this strategy in the Stop the Busywork! Manifesto but let me put it out here again because it really is a beauty.

At the start of each day, I pick the one key thing that I must accomplish, and then two additional things I’d love to accomplish. I stopped doing this during April – what can I say? I’m weak! – and I’ve felt the lack of focus that this discipline had brought me. It’s back again in May.

3. Standards

When I get busy and overwhelmed, I find that the standard at which I deliver sinks to “as good as I could manage this time.” It’s like getting rated a 3 out of 5. Not awful, not brilliant, just tediously, boringly, predictably OK.

I’m setting myself one of two standards for everything I do.

Either buttock-clenchingly, gut-laughingly, fantastic. Something that I sweat over, take risks over,
make bold or brilliant or provocative. In other words, just how Hugh MacLeod puts it.

Or bare-minimum-OK. Sufficient to the task at hand, a Good Work piece of productivity and efficiency.
The epitome of efficiency.

Projects

My brain is like a blackberry bush. It produces some juicy fruit. But left unchecked, it quickly grows wild, spreads everywhere and makes everything thorny and unpassable. OK, that might be stretching the metaphor a little, but it’s not far from the truth. I’m constantly being distracted with new ideas, new possibilities. All of them, of course, brilliant. And shiny. And tempting.

4. Two projects limit & a subs bench

I’ve got a new planning tool up on my wall which forces me to pick the two creating projects I’m working on. My low-tech approach is to draw a box that only fits two post-it notes, so I have to physically pick which two projects I choose. I’m allowed two other projects where someone else is taking the lead on everything but the content production. And everything else goes on the subs bench, waiting to make it into the box when the time is right for them.

5. Days per

Actually, this is one I’ve adapted from Jim Collins. I’ve set myself a limit of 65 days spent in delivery mode (which is Good Work for me, typically) per year. I’m already at 55 days booked for the year – so with 10 days left, I’m finding myself being very careful about what I now say Yes to.

This is really helping me with the “how much is enough?” question. Before setting this limit, there really wasn’t an “enough”. More was always better, and after the challenges of 2009 that temptation is stronger than ever. Now I know how much is enough, and it’s making me braver and more thoughtful as to what I’m committing too.

Work vampires

Emails and meetings – two of the great banes of our working existence. Both seem to expand endlessly to fill the time available. I love the point Jason Fried makes in ReWork when he says that our working days are set up to be interrupted. And when we’re interrupted, we can rarely raise to the challenge of doing Great Work.

6. Email haiku

OK, you can write more than 17 words. But write no more than four sentences per email. And by the way, a long email doesn’t need a long reply.

7. Start over

Here’s he boldest email move from Swiss Miss-declare email bankruptcy.
I’ve just done this with the 400 emails in my “for reading” folder, and it feels fine.

8. Give fair warning

Two variations on the same general theme. Stop being whipped by your own email inbox.

Put an “out of office reply” on every email. Tell them “I typically respond to email three days after receipt.
If this requires a more urgent response, please call me on …”

And I can’t remember where I first heard this tip (let me know if you know the source), but this is a brilliant tactic if you’re about to go on vacation. Create an out of office email that says “I will not read this, ever. On my return from vacation on [insert date], please resend this email if it is still important and relevant.”

And on your return, keep your promise. Delete all awaiting emails.

9. A counter-offer

Gwen Bell taught me this brilliant tactic.
Knowing how seductive email (and its various, multi-headed offspring like FaceBook, Twitter, etc etc are), make clear what you’re choosing email over. Here’s how your list starts. “Instead of doing email, I could be…” Write down 10 things that would be a better use of your time than pecking away at email.

10. Shrink your meetings

Halve the scheduled time on every meeting you have. Meetings expand to fill the time allotted.

Err on the side of too little, and see what happens.

11. Awesome-ify your best meetings

There are some meetings you have to have, you want to have. Going back to strategy #3 on standards, what will it take to make this meeting one that people actually want to attend. How do you add some humanity, some fun, some courage, some interaction, some risk, some enjoyment into the meeting? And don’t think you have to figure this all out yourself. At the next meeting, before you get into The Stuff, spend 10 minutes with the group asking them how you as a group can make the session fantastic.

Information

You’ve got to get ruthless with the amount of information coming at you. Data is everywhere, information is ubiquitous. What you want is wisdom, what you’re looking for is meaning.

12. Read what’s brilliant

Amongst all the chaff of the internet, there are many kernels of genius. Create your top 10 list of reading that inspires, provokes, makes you laugh, reminds you of what’s good in humanity.
Five on my list of 10 are : Chris Brogan, Seth Godin, Indexed, Merlin Mann, and David Rock.

13. Keep only re-readable books

My bookshelves are a dusty treasure-trove of wisdom. Maybe 20 books in total I’ll look at again. The others, I’m going to send to Better World Books who sell them on to support literacy projects around the world.

Self-care

None of this is any good at all, if you’re more tired, less joyful, more confused, and less nourished is it?

14. Sleep more

On the radio recently, I heard a great piece about the price we pay for sleep deprivation. Go 17 hours without sleeping, and it’s like you’ve got a .05 blood alcohol reading. 21 hours, and it’s .08. Sure we can operate well enough on six hours sleep a night. But the typical need for a full night’s sleep is a little over eight hours. What would be possible, what Great Work could you do, if you were that well nourished?

15. Define your 100

I love this picture of the fabulous Gwen Bell seated under her Life
List. It’s 50 or so things To Get To. I know we’ve all heard of the 1001 things to do/see/hear/lick before you die, but rather than getting someone else’s list, sit down and write down some amazing, joyful things you want to do.

I’ll give you some of mine: see the Northern Lights; shave my head; cycle the Silk Route; speak to a crowd of 10,000 people; bathe in the  Blue Lagoon in Iceland, cycle a leg from the Tour de France; learn how to create coffee art; Launch the Possibility Institute; walk the Kakoda Trail…

People

You can’t escape this. It’s the last, but not least question of the 5.75 Questions You’ve Been Avoiding.

16. Deal with the seagulls

Soccer legend Eric Cantona – a philosopher as much as a football genius – once said “When the seagulls follow the trawler, it’s because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea. Thank you very much.” No-one’s quite sure what it means, but in our household it’s come to mean making choices about who you spend time
with. The seagulls – people who follow for scraps without adding much – are people to limit time with. (And gosh, even writing this I notice how hard it is for me to say, for instance, to spend no time with.) But there are people who distract, drain, discourage and disable. Take the time spent with them down to the bare minimum. Which might just be 0 hours and 0 minutes.

17. Find people who create doubt

I actually have two “mastermind groups”. One, my Brain Trust with Molly, Eric, Jen, Michele and Mark has been going for about four years. We check in on a web forum at least once a week (and sometimes as often as daily), talk on the phone every two weeks, meet in person once a year. After all this time, we still, all of us, have moments of doubt about whether we’re good enough for the group, whether we’re “adding value.” My Toronto group is newer, Karen and Mark. We meet once every three months in person, and spend a good part of the day diving down into one another’s business. And ditto. We all harbour doubts about whether we’re good enough.

Hang out with people who stretch you, make you doubt yourself, hold you to a higher standard than you hold yourself, a kinder on you than you are on yourself, that can remind you of your brilliance and your blind spots. Find these people and invite them along to play.

And how about you?

Please share a tactic or two you have that keeps things fresh for you here on the comments section of the blog.

If you enjoyed this post, you'll also like:

1. How did your first 90 days go?
2. Stop the busywork #1: 7 strategies to do more Great Work
3. Why working isn’t working – Jonathan Fields & Tony Schwartz
4. Great Quote 78 If you don’t design your own life plan…

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