Sometimes, the best things you do, the best work that you can put forward or put out there, happen over the longest period of time.
More and more, I come back to this matrix that I learned about years ago.
The most important work we ever do is in the bottom right hand corner because we always do the urgent, important work always only when things float to the surface right in front of us that we get it done and we should never do the work on the left hand side, although we get distracted by top left all the time.
So we put back the non-urgent important work until it never actually gets done or disappears from our minds.
Not the last time I was on sabbatical was 23/24, but the time before, 22/23, I spent a lot of time writing, setting up projects, and looking for the next 3,4,5 years (it wasn't as good. It wasn't as productive last time).
I turned back to some of that paperwork today because I had some real space for non-urgent, important work. I realised that one of the projects that I started, then just on pieces of A4 TCA paper scribbled down and folded over in the corner, held together by a paper clip (like I do for filing), came to fruition this week, 18 months later.
The guys from Scotia IT were fitting 2 360-degree Smots cameras in the Academy to film all of our lectures and practicals.
We're going to launch this live and to the world (literally) on day one of the Rony Jung master class in July, where we provide a live question-and-answer Webinar on a global scale with edited versions of one of his lectures and his hands-on practicals that we have recorded and edited that day.
It's a big project for us, but it's only the start of using these cameras every single day, all the time, to record lectures, practicals, interactions, events, team meetings, whatever we decide to do.
We started with thoughts and ideas in the shed in my back garden 18 months ago in a non-urgent important workday about what our education would look like digitally three or four years from now when we launched the new building when we extend the Academy, all of these plans that we have (project campus!).
If I'd started that project today, it would take 18 months to get it going; it needs money and thought and invention and staff and morale and buy-in and all sorts of different things that it takes over 18 months because, throughout that whole 18 months, I was constantly interrupted by the urgent, important (and probably the urgent and non-important).
So tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, when you have a bit of space, when you have the joy of having the time of making yourself a coffee and sitting down with whatever it is you spew your thoughts out onto, then imagine in 18 months' time what it will look like when the stuff that you're doing today, which won't benefit you tomorrow benefits you a long way forward from here.
There are not a lot more things that are more satisfying than that.
Blog Post Number - 3840
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