The unknown is often labeled as chaos. It has a tendency to destroy plans. Higher chaos means you lose the ability to be deliberate, thus becoming mostly reactive and, in turn, less efficient.
There are many ways to go about taming chaos and the unknown. Over the years, we’ve developed a simple two-step approach that can help. It’s not the ultimate silver bullet for planning, but it can get you out of a tight spot without the need to invest a lot of time, people, or money. Pragmatism, facts, and data can help you figure out outline a path to your local maximum — success in the terms of your current perception of reality. However, not knowing what you don’t know blocks you from achieving your global maximum — success in absolute terms.
Feeling overwhelmed? The first step is only to acknowledge that you can’t do all you think you should be doing. You might already be thinking, “This doesn’t apply to my situation,” or, “Everything I’m doing is really essential.” Sorry to say, most people feel that way about their work. And everyone ends up hitting the same wall: dead-ends of time, resources, or market.
Maintaining a state of hyper-prioritization is much harder than deciding to start. Hubris and self-doubt will make you second-guess your decision. Staying true to a focused state, though, allows you to achieve small but complete iterations and deliveries, rather than have many ongoing projects that take a long time to materialize.
To help you maintain a state of hyper-prioritization, you need to reduce the number of sources of information you view and focus solely on the right data streams and initiatives for your situation. Start with a look at yourself.
<aside> 💡 If you are not sure of your top priority, please review The Remote Flow and follow the guidelines there. They will help.
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Once you determine your top priority and eliminate distractions, the challenge now is to find balance. You need to model your operating universe balanced around three atomic structures, Speed, Efficiency and Capacity. Here’s how we can define them: