Chapter 2

From chaos to clarity

What is it about chaos that kills our productivity? We all recognise that feeling – when chaos has us stuck, overwhelmed, chasing our tail or frozen to the spot, angry, frustrated or confused, feeling lost or going over the same ground again and again.

Sometimes it’s low-level chaos:

A little nag in the back of your head whilst trying to prepare for a client meeting.

A few minutes of paper shuffling to find that report you need.

A flutter of uncertainty as you glance at your inbox, wondering ‘is there an email I’ve forgotten to deal with somewhere in the pile?’.

A couple of tricky conversations to negotiate.

A slight panic when you think of the deadline that’s approaching on the horizon.

A missed call here, running a few minutes late there, remembering, at 11:53 pm, that you really ought to book that dentist appointment – and that you’ve forgotten to call your mother, again.

A vague feeling of familiarity when you revisit that item on your to-do list that’s been stuck there for a while, followed by light relief, with a sprinkling of guilt, when you turn to something that’s easier to tick off the list instead.

Sometimes it’s complete hair-pulling, brain-melting, stop-the-world-and-let-me-off-now chaos:

When all the conversations and all the projects and all the deadlines all converge into one.

When you forget your own name, let alone that person whose email you desperately need to find.

When you’re having multiple conversations in your head, on your screen, on multiple screens, and a small voice that says ‘where’s that file?’ or ‘what’s for dinner?’ sends you over the edge.

When everything takes you by surprise and, the minute you think you’ve got something nailed, it all changes.

When you feel like there are so many unanswered questions, but you haven’t even figured out what the questions are.

When your brain shuts up shop and sets up an automatic reply of ‘I know nothing’.

When you can’t get to sleep because you keep replaying that conversation with Inland Revenue, and you wake up dreaming that you’re texting a colleague to apologise for missing your 2 pm call, only to look in your diary later in the day and find it’s scheduled for 1 pm.

When the dread of opening your emails becomes so overwhelming that it spoils your weekend if you don’t check it to allay your fears.

When the requests and the work and the interruptions and the fires just keep coming.

When you keep telling yourself ‘when’: when things slow down; when that event is over; when this project is finished; when I hit this deadline; when I clear that backlog.

When all you want to do is press stop, hide in a cave and play Candy Crush because, at least then, you will feel like you know what the heck you’re doing!

Where’s your chaos?

Not all chaos is the same. What kind of chaos are you dealing with? How many of these can you identify with?

Unfinished business

It starts with something small: a document we put on our desk to read later; a leaflet we might be interested in; an email we’re not sure how to respond to. When those little things pile up, they become big things: backlogs, clutter, never-ending to-do lists and overflowing inboxes.

It’s not just physical clutter, either. The jobs that stack up in our head create chaos: when you find it hard to switch off; when you’re working on one project and the other refuses to leave you alone; when your body leaves work at the end of the day but your brain doesn’t – the chances are you have unfinished business.

The predictably unpredictable

This can be anything, from last-minute requests, clients you keep having to chase, bosses who change their minds, colleagues who ask you for help, but don’t actually know what they want, trains that get delayed, technology that decides to run slowly just when you have two minutes to grab that document before the meeting, to handouts that get lost in the post.

It’s not just work, either. It could be children waking up at 5 am; a last-minute wardrobe disaster; socks that ‘don’t feel right’ when you’re rushing children out of the door; when your mother decides to call just at that moment when you’re trying to coax the cat down from the fridge, mop up the milk and break up a fight between the kids without burning the spaghetti.

We know they’re coming, we just don’t know quite how or when – and we haven’t decided how we’re going to deal with them.

Plot twists and curveballs

Sometimes things don’t go to plan. Sometimes plans change. With the best of intentions and planning, we do get hit with genuine curveballs. Things we didn’t plan for, things we couldn’t have planned for and, often, things we have little or no control over: when the company announces a restructure; when tax rules change; when ill health hits or when your bank account gets frozen; when a landslide diverts all trains, or the school closes because of a boiler failure; when your boiler decides to flood the kitchen or your coffee flask leaks all over your bag.

The hardest thing about this type of chaos is the simultaneous loss of control and the urge to take control somehow. You feel responsible for finding a solution and powerless to stop the problem from occurring in the first place.

Noise

Sometimes chaos comes from noise: too much going on; too many voices; too many emails; too many distractions and interruptions demanding your attention.

These are the days when you know you’ve been busy, but have no idea what you’ve actually achieved. Days when a piece of work takes you 10 times longer because you keep getting interrupted. When everyone and everything in the office, on your desk, in your inbox and in your head seems to be demanding your attention all at once.

The void

Sometimes our source of chaos is not noisy at all. In fact, it’s almost the opposite of noise.

It’s the void of uncertainty – that massive project you’ve committed to, the role you’ve taken on, that deadline you’ve just agreed to – where you know you have a responsibility to deliver, but you have no idea what the work will actually look like, let alone where to begin.

In the face of uncertainty, our minds try to fill the void. With questions. With scenarios. With projections good and bad. With possibilities – infinite possibilities. And ideas. And fears. In the absence of knowing, we imagine. And, sometimes, that can be far more chaotic than any reality.

Time travellers

Then there’s the chaos that doesn’t even exist – at least, not right now, in this moment. This is the chaos that comes from hanging onto the past or worrying about the future.

How often do you find yourself replaying conversations, rethinking decisions, rewriting emails in your head, dissecting that meeting that didn’t go so well, worrying about the deadline you have coming up, while wondering what to cook for tea?

Reflecting, reviewing and planning can be useful, of course, but, when it becomes dwelling and worrying, it’s surprising how much space this can take up in our heads.

The runaway train

Sometimes, chaos comes from the sheer speed that we are travelling. Things are happening so fast that we don’t have time to think or stop – have you ever tried to jump off a moving train?

The days when you rocket from one thing to another, screeching round corners and sweeping people along with you: when it works, it’s exhilarating – an achievement in itself. But, when it doesn’t, and you veer off course, the crash can be spectacular. It’s a job in itself just keeping the train on the tracks.

At this speed, everything feels chaotic. The unexpected and the expected. The big stuff and the little stuff. There is no time to stop and think. In fact, ‘I haven’t got time’ has probably become your mantra.

Chaos kills our productivity when it scatters our focus, steals our energy and sends us spinning in a hundred different directions. It convinces us that there’s no time to stop, let alone enjoy, the journey; that there is no point because we can’t control it all, anyway; that the only option is just to keep kicking our legs as fast as we can and hope that we don’t drown.

But what if we have more control – and need less control – than we think? What if, instead of attempting to control it all, we can create our own oceans of calm in a world of chaos, ride the waves without losing ourselves, and let life take our breath away without killing us?

What we really need is not control, but clarity, to do our best work and live our best lives from the midst of the chaos.

Creating clarity: what’s your territory?

Do you ever have the feeling that you’re chasing your own thoughts around your head? Try and pinpoint a thought and it seems to run away and spiral into several other thoughts. Try to work out a problem and, the more you think about it, the worse it seems to get. Try and focus on one thing and several other jobs start nagging at you.

The more you try and keep in your head, the less headspace you have to think with.

It’s really hard to gain perspective when everything is in your head and you can’t see the wood for the trees. When everything is close up, in your face, demanding your attention. It’s also harder to separate your thoughts and your feelings, your reality from your fear, evidence from imagination: fear and difficulty often can appear larger in your head.

Step 1 Identify the chaos: what’s on your mind?

The first step to navigating chaos is to get it out of your head and capture it on paper (or a screen), where you can see it all in one place and start to make sense of it, instead of perpetually chasing thoughts around your head.

Do it now. Go and grab a pen and paper or, better still, a stack of Post-it^® Notes, and ask yourself, ‘What’s on my mind?’. Then write. Write down everything – things you need to do, things you are concerned about, things you are trying to remember, projects you have on the go, errands you need to run, people you need to call, ideas you have knocking around your head. Simply do a brain dump and empty your head.

Step 2 Identify the territory: worry vs. work

Not everything you worry about is within your control. Not everything you write down will have something you can do about it. Sometimes our greatest chaos comes from feeling obligated without being in control: having a responsibility over a situation without the capability or capacity to do something about it. We need to separate the worry from the work.

An exercise I use often with my clients is Stephen Covey’s Circles of Concern and Influence.³

• On a large sheet of paper, draw two circles – one inside the other.
  
• For each item you have written down, ask yourself, ‘Can I do something about this?’
  
• If the answer is no, put it in the outer circle. This is what Stephen Covey calls the circle of concern. These are the things that may impact you, but you have no control over.
  
• If the answer is yes, put it in the inner circle. This is your circle of influence. These are the things you can do something about.
  

Take a look at the overall picture. How much of your focus is in your circle of concern? How much of your time and attention is taken up by worry over things that are beyond your control?

Here’s your choice: you can choose to wander aimlessly in the vast wilderness of worry (and there will be plenty to keep you busy there) or you can focus on the work and claim it as your territory. The choice is yours.

Step 3 Identify the work

Now take a look at the inner circle. For each thing you have written down, ask yourself, ‘Am I clear what I need to do here?’.

If you have written something like, ‘Sort website’ or ‘Charlie’s behaviour’, it might be within your sphere of influence but, if you haven’t identified what you need to do about it, then it will remain a worry rather than something you can actually work on.

To identify the work, ask yourself, ‘What do I need to do about this?’ There might be several things that come to mind. Make a note of them. If you are using Post-it Notes, put each thing on a separate note. Then ask yourself, ‘What’s the first thing I need to do about this?’. Then make sure that that one is at the top of the pile and is the one you can see when you look at your circle of influence.

Repeat this until everything in your circle of influence is a clear action that you can take. Now you have your work.

Clarity in the work

What makes today’s world of work particularly chaotic?

1. The work never ends. The days come and go, but there is always more to be done. More calls you can make, more research you can do, more errands to run, ideas to pursue, people to connect with, leads to follow up on, more emails that land in your inbox, more requests, more opportunities, more horizons to explore, more challenges to meet, more targets to break…
   
2. Work doesn’t form an orderly queue. Work arrives at different times, in different ways and progresses at different speeds. Our job is not just to do the work. It’s to work out the work – to define the work, to choose the work, to manage the work, to juggle the work…
   
3. Life doesn’t stop when you work. Of course, it’s not just the work. It’s the life outside of work – from everyday chores like taking out the bin and buying toothpaste, to things you keep meaning to get round to, like making that doctor’s appointment, calling your friend or writing your will, to big things such as moving house, getting married and choosing schools, and fun things, like seeing friends, building kit cars, band practice, marathon training or going on holiday – and, even, simple things such as eating and sleeping! All this needs to happen too, in between, around and alongside the work.
   

Sometimes it feels like everything is moving in different directions, waiting for a spectacular crash. At other times, it’s gridlock. Nothing is moving. There’s traffic, there’s noise, it’s stressful, but nothing seems to be moving forward.

That is when we need some traffic control.

Traffic control

Managing workflow is a bit like traffic control. If you let everything run in every direction, there is chaos. Nothing gets done, everything goes crazy and you are likely to see some spectacular crashes.

Think of all the things you have on your plate right now – tasks, projects, errands, chores, ideas, nags, reminders – at work, at home, in your personal life, your social life…

How many things do you have on your to-do list and on your radar right now? How much of it is on red, where you’re stuck and don’t know how to move forward? How much is on amber, where you’re waiting for someone else, something else or even on your decision before you can move forward? How much is on green, where you’re good to go?

RED: WHAT’S STUCK?

What’s stuck but still on your radar? Maybe you’ve hit a dead end. Maybe it’s not quite worked out how you thought it would. Maybe a supplier has just pulled out of a deal at the last minute or a company restructure has thrown a spanner in the works. Maybe you’re stuck and haven’t figured out the next step or maybe it’s completely dead but still on your radar: abandoned but still on the road; done but not quite dusted. What’s been hanging around for way too long, gathering dust on your to-do list?

When we have too many things on red, we feel frustrated. Nothing is moving forward, everything is stuck: we need to figure out a way forward. When we have a few things on red – but stuck permanently there – it might be tempting to ignore them, and let the green traffic work its way around them. But that still takes up space on the road and makes it harder work for the traffic to flow.

What do you need to release? To take off the road completely?

What do you need to take action on, to get unstuck?

What do you need help with?

AMBER: WHAT’S ON HOLD?

What is pending on your to-do list? What are you waiting on someone else for? What will you get round to someday? That piece of information you’re waiting on, the lead time you need to give someone else to make a decision, the time it takes for an order to be processed or a decision to be authorised, the work you’ve delegated, decisions you’re delaying…

Whether you’ve chosen to put that piece of work on pending or you’re waiting for someone else to come back to you, revving your engines at an amber light, poised to take action but not actually going anywhere, takes effort and energy and distracts you from the work that you can be getting on with.

What do you need to park instead?

@waiting: for the things you are waiting on

Waiting for Joe from accounts to send you those figures before you can do anything else with your presentation? Tracking a missing parcel and need to wait seven days before you can chase it? Want to set yourself a reminder to follow up a sales enquiry if you haven’t heard back within the next two weeks?

Keep this separate from your actions, the things that you can be working on right now, so that you don’t create a stop–start momentum where you keep bouncing between ‘Yes, I can do that: go go go’ and ‘No, I can’t do that right now, still waiting: stand down’.

But do keep track of it because then you won’t need to carry it around in your head any more. I keep it in a separate @waiting category of my to-do list, away from my actions, together in one place where I can check in regularly and nudge or chase as need be.

Ideas park: for the things you choose to put off

Is it just me or do our best ideas come when we are trying to focus on something else? An idea for a blog post, an interesting new tool you’ve discovered, campaigns you might want to run in future, a project that’s on the back burner, a book to add to the reading list, that brilliant shiny new idea you’ve just had when you were trying to focus on something else.

That’s when an ideas park comes in handy. This is somewhere to physically store your ideas, out of your head, so they stop distracting you and are kept safe for you to come back to when you are ready to actually do something with them. You could use a separate notebook, the back pages of your notebook, a physical or electronic file, a tag or category on your to-do list app or, as one of my clients did, keep an actual ideas jar on your desk: every time she has an idea that is different from what she is focusing on, she writes it down on a piece of paper, folds it up and puts it in the jar. That way she gets it out of her head and keeps it safe – her ideas jar becomes like a treasure chest, full of ideas to explore when she is ready.

GREEN: WHAT’S GOOD TO GO?

So, everything should be green, right? Well, not quite. Giving everything the green light creates exactly the kind of chaos you would imagine if all the traffic lights at a busy junction suddenly turned green. You have havoc: cars cutting up left, right and centre, some spectacular crashes and near misses, lots of swerving and, eventually, gridlock… it would be total chaos.

We can do anything, but not everything at once – so the saying goes. Our productivity depends on how well we manage the traffic as much as how well we drive the car (do the work). And, when we manage it well, the traffic flows and driving becomes a dream, rather than a danger.

Incoming!

How do you manage the incoming stuff? Do you just tend to react to whoever’s shouting the loudest or to what happens to land in your inbox when you’re looking? Do you deal with things as soon as they arrive or do you let it all pile up and see which one floats to the top? Do you catch everything that arrives or do some things fall through the cracks? Or do you duck and hide and hope nothing sticks?

If there’s always more work to be done (and, arguably, more work than can be done), dealing directly with the incoming is exhausting, unrewarding and can lead to perpetual firefighting and constantly reacting to whatever’s shouting the loudest, rather than progressing the things that matter to you and that perhaps nobody else would chase you for. But, not dealing with the incoming can also lead to being bogged down by backlogs, missing things, forgetting things and a constant sense of playing catch up and not quite knowing what you’ve overlooked, that might come back to bite you.

As a Productivity Ninja, I teach people the CORD Productivity Model to help them manage everything they need to get done in work (and life).⁴

CORD stands for capture and collect, organise, review and do.

1. CAPTURE AND COLLECT

The first stage, capture and collect, is simply about having a robust method of capturing all the incoming stuff that you want to keep in some way, shape or form. It might be one for the ideas park or an action that needs doing this week. At the point where it’s incoming, you probably don’t know yet. But, if it has passed the first stage of ‘do I want to pay it some attention?’, then you need a way to capture it, rather than storing it in your head.

2. ORGANISE

This stage is about defining the work. The job here is to filter from a mass of ideas to ‘what’s worth doing?’ and ‘what’s the next action?’. This part of traffic control is about parking what’s pending or waiting, deleting what’s not worth doing and making sure what goes on the road is fit for purpose – that is, well-defined, specific next actions.

3. REVIEW

Review is where we go fully into boss mode. Check in with the bigger picture. How is everything going? What’s on track? What’s next? This is where we make decisions about direction and priority. What do we need to make space for this week? What’s our focus? It’s also where we check in with ourselves: how am I feeling?; what am I resisting?; how’s my energy?; am I making time for what’s important to me? and what do I need to do differently?

4. DO

Do is about ruthless execution and effortless momentum. Having captured, defined and reviewed the work, this is where we get down and ‘do’. Drive the car. Focus on the road ahead. Make the journey. Get the job done. Even then, there are things that can get in the way – distractions, obstacles, bumps in the road, unexpected road closures and U-turns. Things we need to respond and react to in the moment but, with less of the reactive in our day to day, we find we are more prepped and primed to respond in the moment.

5. Done

Technically, this is part of the ‘do’ stage – or the result of the do stage of the CORD Productivity Model – but it’s something that so often gets overlooked, I think it’s worth a mention here.

Done. Actually ticking it off the list, closing it off and celebrating that achievement before moving on.

We often miss out on this stage because we’re so busy moving on to the next one, but here’s why it’s important: it’s about switching off. It’s about actually finishing – doing that very last step that marks the project complete, instead of letting it hang around as that tiny thing you just have to do.

For me, this is where I’m tempted to keep tweaking, instead of publishing and sending it out there. To keep editing, keep working on it. For my husband, this is the point where he stops slightly short of the finish line. He’s put in all the effort and got the project almost there, then leaves the very last thing undone: the edging on the living room floor; the fairy lights and mirror that add that final touch to our daughter’s room, still sitting in its packaging. Whether you keep working at it or you stop just short of being able to declare the task complete, either way, you keep it in motion. It’s still part of the traffic you are managing, still taking up space on the road, still requiring a little bit of your attention.

Maybe that last thing is actually just filing the file away, deleting the email or archiving the project, instead of leaving it lying around like an abandoned car on the road. There is nothing left to be done but it’s still taking up space and you’re still having to navigate around it.

In place vs. in use

Kitchen designers and professional organisers both work on the principle of dynamic order, the idea that things do not stay in one place all the time, but everything needs a place to be ‘in use’ and to be ‘in place’ when it’s not in use. For example, when my children are playing, the toys are in use and belong on the floor. It can look like a mess, but the toys are exactly where they’re supposed to be. When they have finished playing, that’s when the toys need to be tidied away and to go back in place.

Clutter happens when we leave things in use, instead of putting them back in place: the letters we read but don’t action; the paperwork we leave on the worktop because we still need to do something with it; tasks and projects we have on the go that we haven’t mentally put down; things we don’t need any more but haven’t let go of. Things we do need but haven’t quite decided where they go. That’s when we end up tripping over toys, when things get broken and my children look at a sea of toys and declare they don’t have anything to play with. Eventually, they abandon the whole mess and find another space to invade/play in.

I see the same thing happen with emails in the ‘Getting Your Inbox to Zero’ workshops I run. Inboxes start as a place for incoming items then, typically, become a dumping ground for emails that:

• need to be actioned
  
• don’t need to be actioned
  
• need to be read
  
• have been read but still need figuring out
  
• are waiting on someone else’s action
  
• are waiting on your decision
  
• have been actioned (but not quite filed away).
  

Do you have too many things in use?

When we have too many things in use, we don’t use any of them properly. Everything gets in the way and nothing gets enough focus. We just end up paper shuffling, wading through the mess and yelping when we stand on LEGO. We move things around rather than use them. We find ourselves surrounded by toys rather than playing with them, surrounded by work rather than actually doing the work.

Putting things back in place – whether that is a physical place or mentally switching off – can help us to focus on the things that do need our attention: the actions, the work, the things we need to do.

It’s also about momentum and motivation; the satisfaction of getting things done. When we stop to acknowledge our progress, it gives us fuel to do more. It reminds us of what we are capable of.

Clarity in where you work: noise control

With open offices and open communication channels on the go 24/7, it’s easy to find yourself being continually interrupted and distracted. A study of Microsoft workers found that, when working on something that required a significant level of focus, it took an average of 15 minutes to recover attention from a 1-minute interruption.

One minute to take that call, check that email, answer that colleague’s question; fifteen minutes to recover your attention, remember where you were up to, reread the last paragraph, get back into the flow of what you were doing before.

Ever get to the end of the day, when you’re closing down your computer, and you find that email you started to write at 9 am? Recent research from Middle Tennessee State University also found that being distracted by personal social media leads to negative effects on efficiency and well-being. Participants were asked to watch a 15-minute video on a computer, with tabs left open for a number of social media sites, including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. They were monitored to see how often they checked social media and were tested on the video’s content. Those who used the sites more did not perform as well as those who used them less – and were also found to have ‘higher levels of technostress and lower happiness’.

How many times do you get interrupted in your working day? How often are you distracted by what else is going on in your world, in your head or on your desktop? How much of your attention is that stealing?

Common culprits for distraction (as reported by workshop delegates) include:

• colleagues in the office
  
• phone calls
  
• emails
  
• your boss
  
• instant messaging chat
  
• social media
  
• the report that’s still sitting on your desk from last week
  
• background noise
  
• me! thoughts of other work, nags, reminders, new ideas, etc.
  

What about sensory noise?

Our senses gather some 11 million bits per second from our environment – but our conscious mind can process only about 50 bits per second. We all filter out information, but some people are more sensitive to certain noise than others.

My husband, for example, works best in total silence. He is particularly sensitive to noise that comes from people – chatter and crowds. Blocking out background noise takes up a certain amount of effort and energy so, even when he can filter out the noise, he doesn’t give his full attention to the work at hand. He notices that noise also creeps up on him. He may not notice it building up until, all of a sudden, it’s completely unbearable.

In contrast, I don’t work too well in a totally quiet or static environment. I find that background noise and movement stimulates me and gets my brain working better than in complete silence. The only exception is when I’m on a phone call or a webinar – when what I need to focus on is auditory. Otherwise, give me the humdrum of a café, with people coming and going, background chatter and music I can hum to, any day. In fact, that is where most of this book has been written – in the corner of a wonderful little local café that serves amazing aubergine caponata.

What’s your optimal working environment? And how well is your current environment working for you? Does it stimulate you, overstimulate you or bore you? Does it get your creative juices flowing or overload your senses? Does it wake up your brain or shut it down?

If you find your environment is too much on the noisy side (or has the wrong kind of noise), here are some ways you can turn it down.

REDUCE DIGITAL NOISE

• Turn off email notifications.
  
• Turn off social media notifications.
  
• Unsubscribe from newsletters or notifications you no longer need.
  
• Set up a rule to filter out the things you want to pay less attention to and move them into a ‘circulars’ or ‘read later’ folder.
  
• Put chat programs to offline/unavailable for the times when you don’t want to talk.
  
• Turn off automatic send/receive (or go into work offline mode on your email).
  
• Turn off the Wi-Fi.
  
• Don’t leave email open in the background (the same goes for social media).
  
• Close tabs/windows when you’ve finished before moving on to the next thing.
  

REDUCE PHYSICAL NOISE

• Use headphones.
  
• Close the door.
  
• Change location: work from home/meeting room/café.
  
• Have an agreed ‘do not disturb’ signal in open offices.
  
• Communicate your availability (more on this in Chapter 6).
  
• Clear clutter from your desk.
  

REDUCE NOISE IN YOUR OWN HEAD

• Write it down, get it out of your head.
  
• Use a trusted second-brain system to capture ideas, reminders and nags.
  
• Focus on one thing at a time (more on multitasking in Chapter 10).
  
• Give yourself a visual reminder of the thing you’re working on (e.g. Post-it Note).
  
• Calm your mind monkeys (more on this in Chapter 3).
  

Clarity in the chaos beyond your control

Responsibility vs. response-ability

‘The day-to-day stuff I feel like I have some control over – to a degree. What really gets me is when something gets taken out of my hands, but I’m left to deal with the fall out. I’m still responsible but I’m not in control, and I convince myself chaos reigns.’

What does it really mean to be responsible? Perhaps it’s more helpful to think about it as response-able. To take responsibility is to choose how you respond. In situations where we may not be able to take control of what’s going on around us, the thing we can control is our response. We can choose how we respond.

We can choose not to take responsibility for what someone else has done but, instead, take responsibility over how we respond, in our emotions, our thoughts and our actions.

We can choose to focus on the frustration, the anger, the feeling of being overwhelmed. We can beat ourselves up with guilt for not, somehow, being able to make this problem go away or avoid it in the first place. We choose to try and control the uncontrollable – and, effectively, choose to feed the chaos. Or we can choose to focus on what we can do rather than what we can’t, to look to ‘what now?’ instead of dwell on ‘what happened?’ and ask ourselves ‘what can I do?’ rather than ‘why me?’.

When we choose to let go of being the victim, ‘why has this happened to me?’, or the perpetrator, ‘this is all my fault, if only I…’, that’s when we can take control, over our own actions and our own response. We can let go of the drama, the guilt, the fear, the anger and the frustration – and see the situation in a new light: a problem, yes, but not a personal attack; a setback, yes, but not insurmountable; a tricky position, perhaps, but not trapped; a curveball, not the end of the world; a plot twist and you’re still holding the pen.

That’s when the chaos stops being our chaos and we no longer need to control it. We just need to navigate and plot a course that works best for us.

Expect the unexpected

How much does your schedule depend on everything running like clockwork? How prepared are you for the unexpected? How much margin do you have for mistakes? I’m a recovering perfectionist. I’ve always set myself high standards, but I’ve never demanded perfection from others. In fact, even when I’ve been hard on myself, I’ve still been encouraging others to be kinder to themselves. I’m too nice to be a perfectionist when it comes to other people, or so I thought.

It was midnight. I was home after a two-hour drive and I had a workshop the next morning. I should have been sleeping but, instead, I found myself printing. I thought I had it all worked out: I knew it was going to be a bit of a three-day marathon, I had scoped ahead, taken a deep breath and got everything prepared and lined up in advance. For once, I was not the one leaving it to the last minute. This time it was someone else – someone else’s mistake and oversight that I had to sacrifice sleep to rectify. Disaster was averted and, even though I had a terrible night’s sleep, the workshop went brilliantly.

But it did get me thinking: yes, it was someone else’s mistake, yes they should have spotted it, yes they could have given themselves more time (it had also been a busy season for them). No, it was not my job to make sure they did theirs and, yes, we would be having a conversation about it. (Thankfully, I knew better than to fire off an email when tired and very grumpy!)

I realised this: when my schedule is so tight that there is no margin for error, then, by default, I am demanding perfection – not just from me – but from everyone around me.

Because I simply have no time to accommodate mistakes. No time for the waiter who has got my order wrong. No time for the learner driver who is stalled at the roundabout. No time for the cashier who is trying to get to grips with the till on their first day or the apprentice who is completely lost trying to navigate the corporate culture. No time for my children to have a meltdown at the door. No time for my colleague to notice, let alone recover, from their mistake.

And it’s not just to do with mistakes. A friend of mine tweeted the other day that his son had chosen to wake him at 5 am on ‘Daddy Monday’. I could completely relate – as my daughter went through a phase where any wake-up time that started with a 6 was joyously celebrated. But it made me smile that he saw Daddy Monday as a day when he didn’t need to get up early, because he was at home with his son and not at work. Another way to look at it would be: ‘Daddy Monday is precisely the day when I need to get up early – and I don’t even need to set an alarm to do so.’

If we work in a last-minute environment, for a company going through rapid change or do anything involving children or animals, part of our job is dealing with the predictably unpredictable. Change is part of the territory. And, when we have the scope and capacity to deal with it, we are actually pretty good at responding to change. There have been many occasions where I have been more than happy to bail a client out of a last-minute crisis, calmly talked my son through tying the laces on the shoes he insisted on wearing or saved dinner by thinking creatively.

It’s when I’m already running late and my son decides it has to be those shoes, when I’m rushing to meet a deadline and the hot potato hits my inbox, or when I’m at the end of my tether and I spill the spaghetti down the sink, that’s when it becomes chaos.

It’s chaos only when we feel out of control but when we are prepared, equipped with some spare capacity and expect the unexpected, we find we can roll with the punches, dance with the change and respond with remarkable agility and grace.

Dealing with uncertainty

I have a theory about the creative process. We start with a brilliant idea. It might be the best thing since sliced bread, it might be a quirky little idea that just might have legs. Whatever it is, it shines enough to spark our interest, for us to decide it’s worth pursuing. By the end of the creative process, we will have created something. It might be nothing like we envisioned initially – or it might be exactly what we had in mind – but it’s something beautiful, whole and real. What happens in between is a vast, empty, wild land of unchartered territory. There is nothing here but the potential for everything, a blank canvas, waiting for you to fill with words, colour, models, formulae – whatever your medium might be. Whatever you can imagine, you can create.

Welcome to the void. The void can be a playground or an assault course, a sanctuary or a prison. It all depends on what we bring in. Here’s what you need to know about the void:

YOU WILL NOT KNOW EVERYTHING

So stop trying. Let go of having to have all the pieces of the jigsaw in place before you start. As Martin Luther King Jr said, ‘You do not have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.’ The journey is created as you take it and some of the best stories only come together, where everything makes sense, at the end.

THERE IS NO RIGHT

The more we obsess about having to get it right, the more confused we’ll become. In unchartered territory, right has not been invented yet. All there is is possibility, and right is whichever you choose. Instead of ‘I have to get it right’, try telling yourself ‘I get to make this up as I go along.’ Embrace the opportunity to shape the outcome as you go along (rather than trying to find the outcome).

YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO CHANGE YOUR MIND

It’s about exploration, not expectation. Focus on discovery, which means you will probably find dead ends and dodgy alleyways as well as wide open spaces. If you chase a rabbit down a hole and find yourself somewhere you don’t want to be, you can always find a different route. Each step you take is meaningful, but not set in stone.

WHATEVER YOU IMAGINE, YOU CREATE

In the absence of knowing, we fill the void with our imagination. What are you imagining? Are you imagining all the things that could go wrong, all the what-if disaster scenarios? Are you focusing on how much you don’t know, rather than what you do know? Are you internalising the uncertainty? Not just dealing with the unknown, but focusing on how much you don’t know, turning doubt into self-doubt. If that is what we fill the void with, that is precisely what we will create: more uncertainty, more fear, more doubt, more worry, chaos and confusion.

Instead, focus on what you do know. Remind yourself of all the truths of what you can do, what you do know, what you are capable of and what you are equipped with. Focus on what you can see – and imagine what’s possible from there. Reframe your thoughts from ‘I don’t know’ to ‘This I know… and this is what I’m discovering/working on/figuring out.’

YOU WILL GET TIRED

Making decisions is hard work. Even on the days when it feels like you haven’t done anything, made any progress or have anything to show for it (perhaps especially those days), the chances are you have been doing a lot of mental heavy lifting.

Research into decision fatigue suggests that our ability to make decisions is like a muscle. Yes, you can gradually build it up to be stronger and more resilient but, at the end of the day, it always gets tired. In fact, every decision you make is like another rep in a workout. That’s why parole board judges are more likely to give favourable rulings at the beginning of the day or after a lunch break. As the day goes on, decision fatigue sets in and they are more likely to settle for the default answer: no.⁶

I have noticed decision fatigue in the process of writing this book, especially at the beginning, when everything is possible, but undefined. Surrounded by uncertainty, with so many decisions to make, I found myself going stir crazy if someone gave me yet another decision to make: ‘What do you mean you can’t find any socks?’.

Sometimes, I didn’t even notice that I was carrying decisions around in my head, mulling them over on the walk to school, until ‘what’s for tea mummy?’ made me feel as if someone had just pulled me away from a high-wire trapeze act and dumped me in the middle of a rugby game.

The more decisions we have to make, the harder each one will become and the more likely we will be to default to the easiest decision – whether that’s to grab the nearest bar of chocolate, crash on the sofa, walk away from that important-but-tricky conversation, explode in a fit of road rage or say yes to that extra piece of responsibility you haven’t quite figured out how to extricate yourself from.

And the more we’ll crave certainty as well. I don’t think it’s an accident that, when we are prone to procrastination, all sorts of mundane things like sorting the pen drawer, watering the plants or doing the ironing become incredibly attractive. It’s the certainty we crave: where we know exactly what we need to do, rather than having to figure something out.

We can’t change the void, or avoid the void. It’s part of the process, part of the journey we need to press through, to get to the other side. But here are some things that will help to bring clarity to the void:

Give yourself a break. If you are in a season of high uncertainty, honour the fact that your brain is doing some pretty taxing work and make some concessions. Let someone else choose what you have for dinner; work out what you’re wearing at the beginning of the week. Let go of the unimportant decisions: so what if the children want to change into their pyjamas at 4 pm on a Sunday afternoon? Does it really matter which shade of blue you go for? And do you really need to buy something from duty free? Excuse yourself from a meeting and tell your team you trust them to make the decisions. Pace yourself: limit the amount of high decision-making projects you have on the go. Maybe wait until you’ve finished the book before you start redecorating the bedroom.

Ask for help. Sometimes the simplest of decisions can appear impossible when we are suffering from decision fatigue. So, if you know you are dealing with some mental heavy lifting, ask other people for their perspective and, where possible, delegate your decisions. Set up support structures so that you have colleagues you can talk things through with before you have to present an idea to senior stakeholders. I called my boss the other day to ask his decision on something that, normally, I could have figured out for myself. ‘I’m suffering from decision fatigue,’ I told him. ‘What do I need to do here?’ In about three minutes, he had worked it out and saved me hours of deliberating. We all have times when we are overloaded with decision fatigue. Whether that’s because of a big creative project or a high season of change and unpredictability, the more we can recognise that in ourselves and each other, the more we can help and ask for help.

Ask good questions. Questions such as ‘What do I do?’, ‘What if…’, ‘What about…’ and ‘Is this any good?’ tend to send us round in circles. However, questions such as ‘What’s the next step?’, ‘What do I know already?’, ‘What do I need to move forward?’ ‘Who could I ask?’ and ‘What would make this irresistible?’ are more likely to give us answers we can use.

Lower the stakes. We all want to do our jobs well, to get things right (whether you feel like you’re doing your life’s work or just something to tide you over and keep a roof over your head). The fact that we care is what gives birth to our best work, but the pressure can also feed our performance anxiety. If looking at your deadline or your word count freaks you out, stop looking! Focus on whatever will give you enough motivation to keep going – the next 100 words, the next 20 minutes, the next conversation, the next meal you make, the next person you encourage, the next mile you run, the next staircase you walk, the next step you take…

Make it fun. When you forget about the crazy deadline or the high-stakes pressure and lose yourself in the process of creating, the void can actually be a pretty fun place. We can lose ourselves in the flow when we are unrestricted by expectation, free to charter new territory and make it up as we go along. The trick I have found is to time myself at the gate. Set the time when I arrive and the time when I have to pack up and leave the playground. Everything I do in between is free-flow: no expectations, no targets, just write. And trust – a heap load of trust – that what comes out at the other end will be something beautiful, whole and real.

Over to you