There are 2 types of busy people: the dumb busy, who talk a lot of hot air and always say how busy they are while achieving nothing. And the really busy, who put their heads down and try to achieve as much as possible.

I really hope that, at CookiesHQ], we are of the second kind 🙂

In fact, I’m pretty sure we are, because I’ve been a dumb busy person so many times in my life, that I know what to avoid and how to fix it.

Identify the problems and their implications

I’ve recently realised that I’ve become so good at putting my head down to get the work done, that I almost buried it in the sand.

The past 2 months have been pretty busy for us, with loads of projects, new clients coming in and Zac starting with us. But I’ve been so focussed on getting the work done, that everything else that wasn’t code related became out of target and focus.

On a professionnal level, I’ve been staring at my screen all day long, doing code, but I didn’t achieve anything for my company. No communication, no new client prospection, nothing. When noone is out there doing the marketing for your company it’s no good.

On a personal level, the gym gradually became a vague souvenir, threatening my well-being and rising my stress level.

The solution(s)

Pomodoro

For the time/tasks issues, I love to use the Pomodoro technique. It’s the kind of mindset that sounds futile when everything is goind well, but that proves very valuable when you need to act quickly on multiple things.

I’ll now make sure to plan multiple breaks during the day, and a quick gym session at lunch time.

Healthy habits

With the gym sessions disappearing, it’s easy to see the crap food being back on the table. This is also something I’ll need to work on. More fruits, more water, less carbs will make my brain happy again.

 The 1%

This one is more about goals and targets. I read about it in Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose. In a nutshell, you and your team should try to improve your company by 1% on a daily basis. If you do that every day, at the end of the day, it will make you 37 times better that you were at the beginning.

I just love this idea. I think it’s great on a professional level as much as on a personal level. What can you do today to be a better ‘person’, ‘runner’, ‘company’ sounds so simple and so hard to achieve at the same time that it must be very powerful.

Being open

For the next few weeks, we will try various techniques I guess, so I’ll make sure to share our experiments as we go.

I’m giving myself 3 months to tackle all the issues and be back on the right track].

If you’ve been there yourself and came through it, we would love to hear about it at [email protected]] or in the comments below.

Image credits: Alasdair R and Francesca Nocella on Flickr