Operation Streamline
by
Phil Madsen
Operation Streamline is not so much a story from the road as it is an activity on the road. I describe it here because I refer to it often in my daily blog. It is an important part of Diane's and my business life.
The name, Operation Streamline, came later but the activity began on September 24, 2009 when I had a moment of transformational rage which is described in my blog entry that day.
Looking back, the seed of Operation Streamline was planted on March 6, 2009, when I received a tour of a company that has actually achieved the goal of running a paper free operation (described here). I have not seen anything like it before or since, in any office I have been in — a business office that is truly paper free.
Once I saw that such an operation is possible, it seems that my brain began to orient itself to create that level of efficiency in our business. Mentally, I appreciated the advantages that a paper-free operation could produce. Emotionally, it began to bother me that Diane and I were so far behind on routine things like business paperwork and struggling under the burden of dozens of projects that I had started but not finished.
The seeds sewn by procrastination had grown and become deeply rooted. Then one day — September 24, 2009 to be exact — in a fit of rage, I vowed to get out of the mess my procrastination had created, and to move forward with better work habits.
I am writing this story on April 30, 2011 and am pleased to report that much progress has been made. Diane and I are no longer behind on ongoing tasks like routine business paperwork. Many of my unfinished projects were resolved by simply abandoning them. They were canceled, shredded, tossed in the dumpster, deleted or otherwise eliminated. While our goals remained intact, activities and materials that did not move us toward them were either shelved or discarded.
In our files at home, on our computer hard drives, in the cabinets in the truck, and most importantly, in our minds, new space has been created by clearing old crap out. It took time to achieve all this and Operation Streamline continues.
Happily, Operation Streamline is now less about clearing out old stuff and more about developing new practices that will further free us from the mundane work and distracting activities that used to get us down. Today, Operation Streamline is about enhancing our productivity and moving forward unfettered by the emotional drag that procrastination produces.
We have not achieved the perfect, procrastination-free life. I don't think there is such a thing. We are human beings, after all, and procrastination is a common human characteristic. But by naming our new practices "Operation Streamline," we have developed a tool that can be used at will to shift out of procrastination the procrastination loop and into something more productive and pleasant.
The procrastination loop affects many people and it certainly affected me. You know you should do something but put it off because it is unpleasant or because there is something you would rather do. The put off thing does not go away so when you next think about it, not only does it feel bad like before, it feels worse because you knew you should not have put it off and the task may have grown in the meantime. So, wanting to feel better, you avoid the task again by putting it off again. This loop feeds on itself until it becomes too painful to bear and you finally complete the task or otherwise dispose of it.
With some activities — like getting around to writing a will, or clearing up an issue with someone who is important to you, or overcoming the fear of bad news that keeps you from getting a physical exam — the thing is forever put off and you carry that burden for years, knowing that you will almost certainly live to regret it one day in the future.
I ran the procrastination loop so regularly that procrastination became a deeply embedded habit in my life. It took a day of ugly, painful rage to shake me out of it, and an ongoing effort to develop new habits that serve me better.
Being human, I will never be totally free of the procrastination loop. But having developed a new approach that I call Operation Streamline, I can shift quickly onto better ground when loop behavior becomes evident. I have learned to recognize when procrastination is taking hold and learned how to stop it.
Sometimes the shift to better ground can be completed by doing nothing more than bringing the words Operation Streamline to mind. Whether I am actually working on something or simply thinking about it, Operation Streamline is an empowering mindset that brings me to a better place.