Sorry, this didn’t get posted last night, but these days things are getting crazy. We didn’t get home from my nephew’s graduation and celebratory dinner last night until almost 11 and there was no way that I was writing this then…

For yesterday’s task, I did a little bit of a different kind of uncomfortable. It is something for work that I have known that I need to start doing, but I just hadn’t gotten around to it. I have wanted to set up an email outreach system looking for new clients for quite some time, but there is a lot that goes into it. Really, it shouldn’t be that hard to do, but there are a lot of moving parts that have to work together to make it work right. And I have haphazardly sent out sales emails before, but never systematically and never effectively as a result. So that was going to change yesterday.

So for day 21, I set up my system. And I swear, it was like everything was battling against me getting it done. There were basically four separate things that I had to get done to complete my task and after each one, something would come up and interrupt me. Client asking for something? Check. School calling to say that we forgot to send in a permission slip for Zac? Check. Orthodontist calling to talk about an appointment that I canceled? Check. Getting stuck in Facebook while doing research for my system? Check. And too many other things to list. But I got it all done.

I got my email system set up. I got a fresh email all set up and verified. It is set up so that I can track when people open the emails and whether they click any links in my emails. I got my template all written. I found a bunch of businesses and their email addresses so that I can start sending emails to them. And I sent my first batch of emails. I ended up getting everything finished, but I could have done it in a much more productive manner if I had been more intentional with how I handled the interruptions.

Takeaway:

When I have something that is going to take some time to set up, I need to limit the distractions that I let in. Most of the things that popped up did not take long to deal with, but they totally interrupted where I was in the process, I had to figure out where I was when I left off, and it wasted time. I need to bring back the time logging task whenever I have something like this that I need to get done because that really helped me to limit any distractions and to stick to my tasks.