The Campbell Academy Blog (66)

Chunks

Recently, I've been thinking a lot about how I work (not what I work on or why, but how I get the work done) and how (strategically) working weeks are spent.

What a privilege that is, isn't it? Except it's a privilege that's open to many, many people in the modern world and the way we live.

And so, after Christmas time, when I come back after my now customary winter break, I'll go down to one clinical session per week, which starts at seven in the morning on a Wednesday and finishes at 1.30 in the afternoon.

Every fortnight, I will do a three-hour consultation session, and that will be my clinical commitment, approximately 7.5 to 8 hours per week on average.

It means the rest of my week will be 'unscheduled', at least until I schedule it, and then it will be scheduled with whatever work I decide to do, which again is an enormous privilege.

And so, when I have these larger areas of time, which will be filled with meetings and Teams calls and Zoom calls and then work time for me to do the things that I want to do to develop the business, I'll have to decide exactly how I will go about that.

It seems to me now that the things I tend to work on (apart from the questions I get asked and the patients I'm asked to see) are bigger, things like projects, things like designing a sales process for The Campbell Clinic and Campbell Academy Group or designing a new face to face business course or stuff like that.

At the start, when you look at these projects, even though you have unscheduled time, it seems almost impossible to know how even to begin, let alone how to get close to the end.

And so, the secret, like it always is when there is a hyper object or something to fix, which seems like the biggest thing is just to break it into chunks.

Start with the start and then write exactly how you will do the middle, break the middle into as many small manageable chunks as you need and then decide what it will look like at the end completed and what you will do after it's finished.

It seems really simple, but taking the time at the start of something like this to imagine what it will be like at the end and what the stepping stones are to get there is the only way to get through the most significant projects of your life.