This post is by Kirsten Simmons of Multi-Passionate.
Last week, five inches of snow topped by an inch of ice kept my movements confined within a 500-yard radius of my front door.
Image by Dennis Matheson
We’ll pause here so those of you from colder climes can laugh at the large metropolitan city that went into a winter storm with a grand total of ten snow plows and no salt. Done now?
As I was saying, Atlanta’s ice storm singlehandedly cleared my week.
At first, I was excited. “I’ll finish the layout for my new ebook, write the sales page, set up a guest posting campaign to market it, write enough blog posts to get me through the next semester, and go through that book on infectious disease modeling and research that website my supervisor wants me to make,” I thought.
Then, round about mid-week, I hit something of a low. “I still haven’t sent those pitch emails, the modeling book is buried under papers on my desk, I’ve hit a dead end with the website, and I haven’t had a substantial conversation with another human in over 24 hours!”
This continued for about a day, until I realized what was going on and did two things that made all the difference.
I went out and found some human contact
I watched the parking lot until I saw someone come out, then suited up and picked my way across the ice to say hello. We ended up talking for a good twenty minutes, and it turns out he owns a local jewelry gallery and gave me some great advice on marketing my line. But even if it had just been a ten-minute conversation about the weather, the roads, and the continuing lack of ice removal, it would have had the intended effect—I needed human contact to anchor my own life in reality.
I made a list of everything I had done.
You know what? It was a pretty long list. I finished creating a value packed ebook with a snazzy layout; I wrote my first ever sales page, and created a website and a banner to go with it; I reached out to the only other person in my niche to discuss a potential partnership; I read two books and my backlog of Bloomberg Businessweek and National Geographic; I cooked so much food that I ran out of Tupperware; and I spent some time participating over at the Third Tribe forums, where I appear to have made some connections that will last me well into the future.
Not too shabby. And that was just the list from the middle of the week—with four more iced in days to go.
So the next time you feel like beating yourself up about what you haven’t accomplished yet, make a list of what you have. You may well find that your accomplishments add up to more than you think they do.
Kirsten Simmons is the polymath behind Multi-Passionate and Written Insight. Her new e-book, The Multi-Passionate Resume Manual teaches polymaths how to use their passions to create a compelling job application and bypass the entry level.
About Guest Contributor
If I’m every trying to get a bunch of stuff done, I will often make a to-do list of stuff I’ve already done along with the stuff I haven’t just so I can check off all the stuff I have done.
It makes me feel good about myself.
Exactly! It’s amazing how good it feels to watch those check marks proliferate or that have-done list get longer. And it’s so much easier to jump into a to-do list if half of it’s already checked off…
As someone who’s worked from home for 5 years now, I’ll say this – if you can get past 6 months without going completely insane, you’re doing ok 😉
Maybe we here in the 404/770/678 should laugh at dwellers in Northern cities for not figuring out how to take a week off from work!
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I like your idea of making a list of the things you’ve accomplished. Lots of times I do things that aren’t on the list and so this type of list could be very encouraging.
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