by Rich Thompson
It’s easy to get stressed out by your job. If you’re a business owner like me, your to-do list feels endless. As with many aspects of my business career, what I learned in my football career helps me cope. If I focused on everything I’m trying to accomplish all at once, I’d be a mess. But playing football helped me learn to focus on just getting the next first down. Forward progress, aiming for 10 yards at a time.
Coach Barry Alvarez was a master at keeping our Wisconsin team focused and motivated. We weren’t very good the first couple of years he was our head coach. He knew better than to try to motivate us by asking us to win 12 games that season. Instead, he focused on small goals within the game, things we could realistically accomplish that would give us a feeling of success. So we worked on things like not turning over the ball, keeping the opposing quarterback in the pocket, and converting third downs to first downs. By focusing on specific aspects of our performance during the game, we got better, and eventually, we started winning games.
It’s another example of my favorite coping mechanism: trust the process. Make a plan, decide on your strategy, then trust that if you follow the plan, you’ll succeed. If you get enough first downs, you’ll eventually score.
You can use the same principle to help you stay focused and calmer during your workday. Take your biggest, hairiest project or task and divide it into 10-yard pieces (or whatever metaphor works for you.) Write down the significant milestones that would move your project or task forward.
Your list might look something like this:
- Send out planning meeting invitation to team
- Prepare agenda for planning meeting
- At the meeting, take notes on to-dos and assignments
- After meeting, send out notes to team
- Put milestones and deadlines on calendars
- Schedule progress meeting for every 2 weeks
You get the idea. If you were a fancy credentialed project manager, you might create a Gantt chart. A Gantt chart is a horizontal bar chart that shows a project’s planned schedule and its tasks or events between a start and finish date. Each bar in the Gantt chart represents a task, while the dates are laid out horizontally. Just like the grid on a football field.
Creating a visual reminder of the project you’re working on can help you stay motivated, just as the markers on a football field mark a team’s progress and show the players how far they have to go to reach the next milestone. Whether you’re marking the days you’ve exercised or met another goal, or creating a to-do list that you can mark off, you’re probably already using visual cues to keep yourself on task.
The next time you feel overwhelmed about a work project, ask yourself what you could do today to move the ball ten yards down the field. Do that thing today. Concentrate on moving forward and you’ll eventually reach your goal.
Rich Thompson is CEO of Podium X and XPG Recruit. He is a former professional placekicker and expert on human resources, career development, training and leadership. See Rich’s Podium.