The blog

For you who pre­fer lis­ten­ing to read­ing, this post is also avail­able as an episode of the ​“Done!” pod­cast:

Mote where it is least expected

These bumps in the road are unnec­es­sary hin­drances on your oth­er­wise quite clear path for­ward and well-func­tion­ing work­day. Most of these annoy­ances are eas­i­ly dis­patched of — although, not always entire­ly by our own doing since we are often depen­dent on oth­ers. But, you always have the option and oppor­tu­ni­ty to take the first step to reduce their num­bers and ensur­ing you have few­er hin­drances and annoy­ances in the future. Con­sid­er­ing the dif­fer­ence it makes to feel that you are tak­ing some kind of action to improve your sit­u­a­tion com­pared to feel­ing like a vic­tim to cir­cum­stance, every step in the right direc­tion is like­ly to have a pos­i­tive influ­ence on your well­be­ing — just like it has on mine when I take actions to do some­thing about what­ev­er both­ers me.

The first step is clar­i­fy­ing what ​”motes” and annoy­ances you fre­quent­ly have to deal with.

Do this

If you want few­er sources of irri­ta­tion in your workday,

1. Take out some­thing to write on, such as a notepad or an app — it does not mat­ter which.
2. Set your phone’s alarm to five minutes.
3. Dur­ing these five min­utes you write down every­thing you can think of that you feel is the least bit annoy­ing, irri­tat­ing, frus­trat­ing, stress­ful, or dif­fi­cult in some way. Per­son­al­ly, I am cur­rent­ly feel­ing a lit­tle despon­dent that I still have not hung the giant moose-tro­phy (mean­ing this) I had intend­ed to orna­ment my wall at work with and a lit­tle frus­trat­ed that so many of my work­days are much more frag­ment­ed than I want them to be.
4. Alright. You now have a list of things you could sim­pli­fy, improve, or get rid of entire­ly. The list reveals that a smoother work­day is not only pos­si­ble but just around the cor­ner if you only make a few small changes. Choose the item on the list you believe will be the eas­i­est to do some­thing about.
5. When you have locat­ed and booked a time-slot in the cal­en­dar suf­fi­cient­ly big for rem­e­dy­ing the annoy­ing thing you have in mind, try to iden­ti­fy the root cause of why it hap­pens in the first place. It might not be what you ini­tial­ly thought it was.
6. Think of at least one solu­tion that either elim­i­nates the root cause or at least reduces its occurrence.
7. Make the change, imple­ment the solu­tion as soon as you can, or take the first step to do so if you do not have the author­i­ty or knowl­edge need­ed to com­plete it all by yourself.

I out­lined this process in greater detail in my third book so I can assure you that there are plen­ty of things that could be done to improve your situation.

From spots to success

If you list all the lit­tle sources of irri­ta­tion or annoy­ances and then do some­thing about them, one by one, you will grad­u­al­ly find that your work­days are a lit­tle eas­i­er, smoother, and more enjoy­able. More of the things that just need to work smooth­ly now do. Only you know what the val­ue of hav­ing smoother days is to you, but to me it almost priceless.

What’s your way?

What are the ​”motes” on your list? Write an email and tell me all about them. Per­son­al­ly, I’m eager to hear from you and per­haps I might even have a tip or trick that might help you resolve one of them.

(By the way, do you know of this way to make clear­ing and clean­ing eas­i­er?)