Start gettin' started...

“The secret of getting ahead is getting started.” (Agatha Christie) from the Jack’s Winning Words blog.

Jack certainly has a knack for finding quotes that seem to be particularly applicable to real estate and life in general. Procrastination is perhaps the biggest roadblock to success in real estate and life. There are many reasons for putting off getting started on things – fear of failure being one of the biggest. Other reasons include poor time management or poor prioritization of the use of your time, lack or planning or preparation for the task at hand and lack of personal accountability.

The point is that if you’ve identified something that needs to be done in order to increase your success, to get you ahead; then you should commit to get started on it. Sometimes getting started is putting together a plan and allocating the time and resources needed for the task. Not everything can just be jumped into immediately without prep time; however, you need to give yourself encouragement that the work you are doing to prepare IS part of the task. You are getting started when you have started preparing.

One thing that many personal coaches will tell you is that you should hold yourself accountable and a way to help yourself do that is to tell someone else (usually a life mate or friend) that you are going to do whatever it is that is at hand , so that you also feel a sense of obligation to get the task done, now that you’ve told people you were going to do it. That, too, is part of getting it done. I kiddingly tell my wife that I’m in the “fixin’ to” stage at that point – I’m fixin’ to do something. Sometimes I get stuck in the fixin’ to stage and she has to gently remind me that I never really got around to the actual doin’ stage. That helps me get started.

Sometimes the  big roadblock to actually getting started can be the imagined size of the task at hand. If you have a really big project that is daunting and causing you to pause before getting started, experts will tell you that a way to overcome your inertia is to break the task down to smaller sub-tasks and start by tackling a few of those small parts. Then the accomplishment of each little sub-task will feel like a win and make moving on to the next part easier. Still the real challenge is to get started. So look at your to do list of tasks and figure out the best approach to each, but GET STARTED. I’m fixin’ to do that right now.