Bonjour this is Cyril from Work Smarter: Live Better.
In this video, I want to share the first principle of a very important habit that I call declutter your mind.
What do I mean by declutter your mind? I mean decluttering all your ‘To Dos’, the ones in your lists, the emails you have kept in your inbox, the post-it notes scattered on your desk and even the ideas in your brain.
So what is the first step…
One of the things that has surprised me over the past 15 years working with many leaders and their teams around the world is that stress is not linked to the amount of work people have to do.
Let me repeat this: stress is not linked to the amount of work people have to do.
I have seen many executives feeling under control despite facing huge amounts of work . On the other hand I have seen people in more junior roles with far less amounts of work feeling completely stressed and out of control.
Stress is linked to the fact that when you come home in the evening you have all these open loop holes in your brain and you are churning things over and over in your brain ‘I forgot to do this and I need to do this…..”
The first step to declutter your mind is ‘Capture on the fly’.
My advice: do not keep anything in your mind. As soon as you think about something you have to do, you have to write it down. You have to capture it. Now. Straight away.
Writing it on a piece of paper, capturing it in an app, using Siri to send an email to yourself. It doesn’t matter how. Choose the tool that works for you. But don’t keep it in your head. This is the worst place to keep something you have to do. Just capture it on the fly. You should constantly have a system that works for you which enables you to write things down the minute you think about what needs to be done.
Once captured, there are a few steps to triage all your tasks and process them. But the first step is to capture it on the fly.
This is this week’s Work Smarter Live Better tip.
I hope you enjoyed it. Until next time, have a lovely day.
A bientot
Cyril
