It shouldn’t, but it does. Amaze me, that is, that after 30 years of using NLP I’m still learning about myself – and will, undoubtedly, still be doing so in 30 years time. (This was written in 2009).
Take for example, my most recent lesson. It can be encapsulated pithily: “Don’t dither – get on with it – and finish it!”
I’ve discovered that if I start a reasonably complex project I need to stick at it otherwise I lose momentum. When I stop it takes a lot of time, once I return to it, to catch up on where I was when I stopped. And this catching-up time is really wasted time.
Re-starting a project is difficult
And another discovery. The longer the gap between stopping and re-starting the more difficult it is to catch up again.
Not earth-shattering there, some of you are probably saying… And, yes, I agree. It’s that un-obvious obvious thing again.
Yet, for me the penny took a long time to finally drop (sorry, if you’re not from the UK, that’s a colloquialism which would take too many paragraphs to explain.)
Take for example, genealogy. I recently re-started tracing my family roots – after a 2 year gap. It took forever to get to where I was 24 months earlier! Re-learning the shortcuts, re-learning to use the software tree-building programme, revisiting data sites, recognising which ones were not useful and which ones simply gave you teasers of info and then asked for your credit card details.
Same thing happened with our recent brochure design and prior to that with Pegasus NLP logo. Just ask Kevin who does this sort of thing for us…
Because of my (now ‘previous’) tendency to start things and then leave them aside for a while we’ve been working intermittently on three of our online brochures since April! And it’s now September and I’ve just sent the final draft off to him.
The unexpected happens
In an ideal world we’d all start things, stick at them, and then finish them. In an ideal world. But the world isn’t like that and especially the world of business. Things vie for our attention. And priorities change. And the unexpected occurs.
But when you do have to stop in the middle of a fairly complex project remember that it get’s progressively more difficult to get back into it the longer you leave it. Because, usually somewhere in the back of our minds, we know that we’ll have that difficult and boring and time wasting catch-up period to go through in order to get back up to speed on the project. A two or three week gap means a loss of momentum which can take a few tedious hours to catch up on.
Like I said it’s not an ideal world.
And I often wonder which world the glitzy ear-to-ear smiling positive thinking people live in. You know, the ones who roll out those time-worn and threadbare ‘do it now’ style clichés.
That said we do need to be aware that ‘getting back in the saddle’ as quickly as possible is the best way of preventing a very long re-learning curve once you again pick up the project.