How to launch that major project in 10 minutes or less

We’ve all had that deer-in-the-headlights feeling when faced with a huge project. When there’s so damn much to get done to create the product or service, it’s easy to feel paralyzed with indecision: Where in the world do you start??

Since big, often-scary projects will continue to show up as long as you’re committed to growing your business, here’s one priceless tip that will enable you to develop the vital habit of taking action NOW instead of getting stalled in fear and overwhelm:

Think on paper (or on screen).

Writing things down—whether you use pen and paper or your word-processing program—invariably yields huge benefits because it:

• creates traction, enabling you to get out of stuck and into purposeful, forward motion

• yanks you out of overwhelm

• allows you to think more calmly about what needs to be done

• keeps you from getting caught in the trap of trying to figure out what to do first (yes, that’s vitally important, but now is not the time to do it)

I tend to be a very linear thinker who’s married to my laptop, so it always surprises me how useful I find it to just start writing project-related ideas on an actual piece of paper in whatever random order they occur to me.

If you, too, tend to be a sequential thinker, I strongly encourage you to give yourself permission to just splat ideas on the paper—no outlines, no bullet points, no logical sequencing. This more random approach practically demands that you accept whatever thoughts fly into your brain in whatever order they arrive. This allows you to accept them as they come rather than bring your forward momentum to a grinding halt by saying, “But I can’t do that until I do this…”. Remember, the whole point of this process is to move you from paralysis to progress.

And that, in all its simple beauty, is how to launch a major project in 10 minutes or less.

Success requires letting go of fear.

Chances are you’ll react like most people who use this technique, with a huge sense of relief—even delight—that you’ve so easily gotten your project off the ground. You can certainly congratulate yourself for a productive day at this point, since you’ve already managed to:

• challenge your old habit of fear- and overwhelm-based procrastination

• taken a step toward creating the far more productive habit of DO IT NOW

• decreased your stress level by moving your project from the looming “To Start” list over to your less intimidating “In Progress” list

• pre-empt the guilt that would inevitably have come with ignoring the important opportunity represented by your big honkin’ project

So…Woohoo for you!

However, if there’s no way you’re willing to stop now that you’re finally in motion, it’s easy to keep rolling:

• evaluate everything that you brain-dumped on your paper in terms of what activities must come first, both in terms of sequencing and importance (See, I told you we’d get to that vital step!)

• if any one step still feels big enough to stir up those old feelings of overwhelm and paralysis, chunk it down into smaller and smaller steps so that no one item on your list is intimidatingly large

• schedule time in your business-development days to address these activities you’ve identified

If you’d find it useful to be walked through this process in more detail, you can download, at no charge, my 5-step Take Action Now System™. Just fill in the box in the upper-right corner of this page so I know where to send it, and you’ll have it in a matter of minutes.

And if you know you do your best working through a step-by-step process with a partner committed to your success, then maybe it makes sense for you and me to get acquainted through a nobody’s-committed-to-nothin’ phone call.

I serve my clients by providing a system and a process for tackling all their ignored-on-the-back-burner big projects, and I hold them accountable for completing those activities that may be scary but are essential to their future success. Whether you and I would work well together to achieve that is impossible to say—unless we have a conversation to make that “good fit/not a good fit” determination.

I’m curious enough that I’m willing to invest 30 or 40 minutes finding out if we have the potential to kick some serious business butt together. How ‘bout you?

(BTW, thanks to Maveric2003 for posting the deer-in-the-headlights image in the Creative Commons section of Flickr.

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