Elephant Burgers is usually about different ways to approach large or ongoing projects and break them into achievable steps. It’s about accomplishment. But what happens when something is important to do, but it isn’t a project to complete?

My son has a study unit at school called “The Basic Needs of Man.” We’re all familiar with the concept. For survival you need food, clothing, and shelter.

Shelter can be a huge project, like building a house. Our neighbor had her small frame house demolished a year and a half ago to build a larger brick home. After many delays, she last said she hoped to move in at the end of March. They still aren’t finished. But when they are she will have a beautiful new home. The project will be over and shelter will only require occasional tasks, like maintenance and cleaning.

Clothing can be a project, too, like sewing a shirt or pair of pants. Even shopping for clothes can be a project if you have to choose a wardrobe for a new situation, such as snow skiing or professional speaking. But between episodes of shopping or sewing, clothing just requires small tasks, like washing and ironing or trips to the dry cleaner.

Food is rarely a project, except for special events. It requires some planning and preparation to make at home, adding a stop to your list to bring home take-out, or scheduling time and allotting money for eating out.

We pay even less attention to water usually, but it’s a much more immediate need than food. When we get thirsty in a public place we look for a water fountain. If we’re running errands, usually in our cars, we can stop at a store to buy something in a paper cup or a plastic bottle. At home we just open the fridge or get out a glass and fill it up.

We have a need that is more compelling even than water. It’s air. We have to breathe all the time. We can’t go very long without it. But unless we’re scuba diving or launching into space we don’t think about having air with us. We don’t even think about breathing most of the time. We just do it.

Think about the things that are important to you that parallel physical survival. These would be things that you need for spiritual health and emotional health. They’re things we easily bump out of the schedule because we don’t feel the immediate thirst, or hunger, or cold.

Our physical bodies are good at stating needs. Our emotional and spiritual selves are much less direct. We suddenly realize we are very bored and disconnected, or very lonely, or drained of energy, and are surprised by it until we think about how we have treated ourselves.

Your emotional and spiritual selves need regular attention and care, like your body needs water and air. You need quiet time, time for connecting, time for challenges that cause you to stretch and grow, time to grieve and let go, time to rejoice, and time to explore inner stillness. Unless you’re focusing on a spiritual journey, none of these things are likely to be on your schedule.

But you need them like you need water and air. They’re just not as demanding as the physical needs. We have to remember to schedule time each day for drinking in and for breathing in what we need emotionally and spiritually. It’s key to good self-care.

Elephant Burgers is about different ways to approach large or ongoing projects and break them into achievable steps. It’s about creative ideas for tackling something overwhelming and making the boring parts more enjoyable. You might be able to stand the taste of that elephant by making it into burgers. But what happens when you get really tired of burgers?

We’ve seen some creative ideas with burgers at different restaurants over the past few months. It’s part of a slightly sad tale. We have a pattern of finding a really great place for burgers and going there two or three times a month. Just as it becomes part of our lives, it closes down. The last time this happened we went on a quest to find another favorite burger place.

We found out you can buy a burger with extra thick bacon, onion rings, barbeque sauce, and jalapeño cheese. You can get a burger with freshly sautéed mushrooms and Swiss cheese. You can find them with crumbled blue cheese or battered and fried jalapeño strips. There’s one with a fried egg on top and one with grilled pineapple. One is served with chopped green chilies and mozzarella cheese – it’s pretty gooey. My favorite at one of our former best-burger places had provolone cheese, freshly sautéed garlic, large pieces of pimientos, and slices of banana peppers. I almost cried when they closed down.

The fundamentals of a good burger are quality meat seasoned right and cooked on a flat griddle to get that crunchy caramelization, or cooked over a nice smoky fire to add that outdoor flavor. If you really love burgers, you probably don’t want to add much to it. But if burgers are kind of plain to you – and there’s nothing that tastes more dull and plain than elephant burgers – the right condiments and toppings make all the difference.

Do you have a really dry and tasteless elephant, like having to take a statistics class to get your degree? Think about playing your favorite music while you study, or be sure you’re in a comfortable chair with your warm fuzzy house slippers on your feet. Buy yourself a special pen and pencil just for statistics homework and make it a special occasion.

Is your elephant tough and chewy, like having to clear out the spare bedroom that became another garage? Plan a party where a group of friends helps you clear it out. Come up with some games for finding the most useless item or sorting a box the fastest. Give away party gifts from the pile of things you plan to throw out. Plan a fun purpose for the money you’ll make from the things you sell.

Are you overwhelmed by how much elephant is left? If you’re working an extra part-time job to pay down debt, it might seem like those two years will never end. Use the time to and from the job to listen to recorded workshops and talks that keep your long-term dreams in mind. If you’re planning a small business, even a part-time one, use the time at work to practice talking about the service or product you’ll offer so you can be comfortable doing that. Find new and interesting stories in magazines, books, or on-line, and practice telling them to people.

That elelpant has to be eaten. You might as well try to enjoy it.

Back in February I posted an Elephant Burgers article titled This Sounds Nuts! But I Think You’ll Like It. I gave a brief overview of a system for defining a long-term vision, setting annual goals, then breaking them into monthly pieces and eventually into daily steps. Boy, was I hot stuff!

Then a couple of coaching colleagues started asking questions about ways to organize their days to stay on task. I shared my system. They told me why it won’t work for them. There was a huge hole in my sytem!

What was missing? The part where you’re willing to do what you schedule.

One colleague explained that it doesn’t matter that the person actually assigning her tasks is herself. Anyone in the CEO role triggers her rebellious streak. It seemed like that would be a rare sort of problem, one solved either through some self-discovery and personal growth, counseling, or personal coaching. Yes, my pride was spiking, and we know what comes next.

Right now it’s the third day this week that I have scheduled my day with tasks that need to be accomplished, spaced them out and allotted enough time, and failed to do most of them. One day the only things I actually accomplished from my list were “Daily planning meeting” and “Daily review.”

I was still doing things, and they were important, but I completely blew off the list. I was annoyed with the list the first two days. Kind of like my colleague who said any CEO will trigger her rebellious streak, even if it’s herself. But by today I started catching on.

Flexibility With Priorities

Some of the things I felt I needed to do instead of the list really were more important once things started developing. I had to be flexible to allow myself to focus my time on the things that turned out to have a higher priority than when the day started. In part, my priorities shifted as I realized I need to change a couple of things to make planning and outlining an idea go smoothly. That’s where I realized I couldn’t do C because I’d been thinking about changing the way I did A. Until I decided A, I couldn’t figure how that would affect B, and of course C depended on B.

But at the end of the day as I looked back, I realized that A was my priority all along. Once again, I had a “plan” to be getting to C and dismissed the importance of the changes I was thinking about for A. If I had paid more attention to priorities A would have been at the top of the list from the beginning.

Listen To Your Calling

Prioritize the things you are drawn to do, that bring you alive, and less to the things you think you “should” do. I keep re-learning this lesson so often I expect I’ll know it pretty soon. My long-term plans for my business include things that logically are connected to coaching, personal growth, and creative career choice. But they’re not things I’m drawn to do right now. So some of the things on my list for this week were steps towards less inspiring goals. Instead of me seeing how the actions would bring me closer to my desired future, they stirred up questions about whether I will actually include those components in my business. Guess what? I didn’t do those steps!

Go In Order, Or “First Things First”

This is another one I keep trying to learn. For example, I can’t design and write a report or an e-book or a script for a recorded training to offer as a gift for signing up for my newsletter until I get clear about the focus of my newsletter. I’ve had steps about building my list on my schedule for three weeks. It was easy to do the ones about brainstorming and coming up with possible ideas.

But when it was time to start implementing a step I had planned I realized I’m still clarifying the focus of the newsletter. Since the offer (the report, book, or recording) I create needs to be connected to the purpose of the newsletter, I couldn’t really start creating it until I decided. All the time I had scheduled to start creating a product for my offer got redirected to considering ideas about the focus of the newsletter.

Some Tasks Are Rotten

Now we’re talking! This is in line with what my colleague said about rebelling against directions. When I schedule tasks that relate to the fun part of my work, I usually wind up doing them early and get through them more easily. When the task is more mundane, I dread it, avoid it, get started late, or justify putting it off a day or two.

It seems to me the trick here is knowing the “rotten” factor of certain tasks and not planning too much “rottenness” into any given day. It’s also reasonable to see how many of the “rotten” tasks you can hand off to someone else or ask someone to help you do.

Accountability

But if the rotten tasks are yours, and no one else can or will do them for you, and you schedule them sparingly so you won’t get bogged down but you still won’t do them, you’re stuck. That’s when an accountability buddy or group is a great idea. Pick your odious task each week and commit to getting it done. If you still avoid it, be open to ideas from the accountability partners to give you new approaches to get it done.

Consider individual or group coaching if you’re staying stuck and not getting important things accomplished. This will give you the opportunity to look at your own resistance and decide if it’s fear, uncertainty, a wise inner voice keeping you from doing something you’re not ready to do, or just your spoiled inner child. Once you are clear on the reasons for your goals and how they will improve your life, you will find motivation to overcome hesitancy, fear, boredom, and uncertainty with the help of accountability.

Unless you don’t. If you try creative planning, accountability buddies, and coaching, but you still can’t get yourself to do much, there might be a different problem. It might be time to consider counseling to understand the part of you that keeps you stuck when you’re longing to change.

You have a plan to change your life. At least you have the next couple of steps.

You look at what you’ve written down to move you forward. You know you want to get there. You remember being excited just thinking about taking these steps.

But now when you look at the steps on your To-Do List you keep putting them off. Some people say it’s resistance—maybe you’re anxious about changing, maybe the rut feels comfortable and keeps calling to you. But that doesn’t really fit.

What could be holding you back?

One possibility is that your steps don’t really seem like something you can do. Or at least they don’t seem like something you can put on a To-Do List and get done.

Are your steps too vague? It’s hard to accomplish something when you don’t know when you’re done.

Are your steps too big? It’s overwhelming to take on something when you know it’s complicated but you’re not sure where to begin or what it’ll take to finish.

Here’s an example. Jeremy has decided he has a passion for music and technology and wants to see if he’ll like working in a recording studio. On his To-Do List he wrote: “Look for part-time position (volunteer or paid) in a local recording studio.”

That’s not exactly an action step for a To-Do List. It’s almost a goal. Let’s rewrite it. Jeremy’s focused goal can be stated as: “Find a part-time position (volunteer or paid) in a local recording studio.” From that goal he gets to try out his interest and see if it fits his passions.

What are the action steps? They include finding local studios, finding out who makes decisions on hiring or internships or informal “hanging out and learning” relationships, finding out the best way to initiate contact, setting up time to meet or talk on the phone with the decision-maker, and so on.

Jeremy’s To-Do List will work better for him if he organizes it like this:

* Identify local recording studios – get addresses, phone numbers, web sites, e-mail addresses

* Call or e-mail one studio to gather information – part-time jobs, internships, opportunities for learning, who makes those decisions, how to contact?

* Follow-up with contacting decision-maker at first studio

* Use information learned to plan how to contact other studios if first one doesn’t have opportunities
* Contact next studio on the list

Each one of these steps is more Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-defined. This SMART system helps you turn long-term goals into short

For me, scheduling my time is like budgeting my money. If I make a plan for it, I direct it and stay in charge. If I don’t have a plan, I spend some here and spend some there and turn around at the end of the day and wonder where it all went.

When you budget your money, you tell your money what you want it to do. When you budget your time, you tell your time… Wait! Not really. You don’t tell your time what you want it to do. You tell yourself what you want you to do with the time you have.

It’s as if you are your own most reliable project manager. In the creative and challenging business that is your life, you are your own best “go to” expert for getting things done.

Here’s the “nuts” part. I came up with this idea for a daily project meeting—with yourself. This is a creative way to use imagery to bring alive a mundane task like scheduling (budgeting your effort).

My idea was pretty basic at first. At the beginning of each day, meet with yourself to look at your goals and the individual steps needed to accomplish them and decide which ones you will do that day. At the end of the day, meet with yourself and review your progress, see if you have to carry some goals over to the next day, and leave yourself notes for the next morning’s meeting.

Take charge of the quality of your meetings. If you can visualize your creative thinking self as the CEO (Chief Everything Officer) in one chair and your organized and task-oriented self as Project Manager in another chair, you might really enjoy this. As CEO, give your Project-Manager-self kudos for the accomplishments, offer ideas for overcoming obstacles that got in the way, and provide encouragement to take on bigger challenges. As Project Manager give your CEO-self feedback on what things in the schedule are distracting and disruptive and suggest removing or limiting them.

Then the idea started growing. I read Michael Masterson’s Early To Rise newsletter from February 25. He wrote an article about scheduling daily tasks that has some powerful ideas. You can read the article here. The link takes you to the newsletter archives. Scroll down to find “Using Daily Task Lists To Accomplish Your Goals.”

I expanded my model to include weekly and monthly meetings to review progress on goals, and an annual meeting to review the goals, adjust them, and set new ones. Following the model looks something like this.

Each year have an annual meeting where you review the past year’s goals and set new goals for the coming year. Break the year’s goals into monthly goals. Review your long-tem plan, too, maybe including three-year, five-year, and ten-year goals, plus ideas that don’t have a time frame yet.

If you really want to give this meeting emphasis and make it special, have a retreat. If you can only afford an overnight stay at a local inn or luxury hotel, do it there. If you can afford a little more travel and a little more time, make it happen. It’s not too late to have an annual review. Pick a night or weekend when you can free up your time, go some place special if you can swing it, or plan a peaceful, uninterrupted time at home. Treat yourself well (nice food, favorite music, a massage beforehand) so you can relax and focus on the meeting. Remember—you are your business’ most valuable employee

At the end of each month, have an end-of-day meeting to review the past month’s goals and the goals you have set for the coming month. Make adjustments where you need to. Break the next month’s goals into weekly goals.

At the end of each week, have an end-of-day meeting to review the week’s goals and break the coming week’s goals into daily goals.

At the beginning of each day, meet with yourself to look at the weekly goals and see which ones you intend to accomplish that day. At the end of the day, meet with yourself again and review your progress. See if you have to carry some goals over to the next day, and leave yourself notes for the next morning’s meeting. Congratulate yourself and set targets for more accomplishment.

I’m just beginning to employ this idea, but I see enormous potential. One of the biggest challenges we self-bossers face is staying motivated to work on things that don’t immediately provide an income. Those who master the challenge have learned to treat themselves the way they would treat valued team members they rely on. This model will help us all do that.

Ordinary things done consistently produce extraordinary results.~Alex Mandossian

I was out of town for over a week from Christmas through the beginning of the year. When I got back my first entry to my career change blog Twisting Road was about things that happened to move my business forward without me guiding them.

Actually I was harvesting the fruits of previous effort that set things in motion weeks before. I took a series of smaller, simple steps to find a name for my business and have the papers drafted to change my corporation’s name. I dropped them in the mail just before I left. When I got home the confirmation letter from the corporations office in my state had arrived.

In thinking and writing about “Elephant Burgers,” breaking things into manageable steps, I have overlooked some important things. I want to acknowledge them here. They come from the power of momentum.

The Momentum of Courage: When you take small steps with things that are scary, you overcome your fears. In the future similar steps aren’t as scary so they are easier.

The Momentum of Familiarity: What you broke into five steps before might become one step in the future, and might be a whole lot easier.

The Momentum of Serendipity: You finally call a person on your list as a potential client or information source to help find clients. He asks if you’ve joined the Chamber of Commerce. You tell him it’s on your list to check out but you have not talked to anyone yet. Turns out, he’s on the membership committee, walks you through the process, and offers to introduce you around.

The Momentum of Intention: You look up a local professional writers’ workshop on the internet and find out where they meet. You print out a map and plan to drive by. Within a few days you realize you’re on nearby streets often, you drive by and see it’s easy to get there. You realize how you can fit meetings into your schedule by planning to do your errands in that area on the day they meet.

The Momentum of Actualizing: As the ideas and plans start becoming real, actual things, the steps get easier. When you finally publish your new web site, you feel more intensity and excitement about editing and correcting text than when you were planning it out on paper or in a document file.

The Momentum of Accomplishment: When you are working on steps towards a distant goal, but you’re reaching the finish line on previous goals, the enthusiasm will lift you, encourage you, and lighten the work on your current steps.

Today I finished the pile of shredding I first wrote about October 19. Today is December 19. It took me that long to get through the pile.

I didn’t realize back then I had a small trash can nearly full of papers to shred. I was only looking at the stack growing on top of the shredder and on a box next to the trash can. Ironically, the trash can is from my first shredder, which I wore out with marathon shredding sessions.

I stuck to my plan pretty well. I didn’t shred once a month and keep going until the shredder overheated and stopped. Yes! That was my previous method.

The new plan was to shred 10 items each day and I pretty much followed it. Whenever I got a credit card application (Good grief! That was most of my shredding!) I would shred it that day. Even if I got 2 or 3 applications, I shredded them plus my 10 items.

Some days I didn’t shred, so on a subsequent day I might shred 15-20 things. I had to fight the temptation to keep going after so few things shredded.

For me, 10 (or so) was a good guideline, because it kept me from shredding and shredding to the point it became a huge task. I paced myself and re-learned the value of tending daily to recurring tasks. The pile disappeared, and I was not frustrated or stressed.

One common concern of people who are looking to make exciting changes in their lives is finding the time to make it happen. One of the best ideas I’ve heard for having enough time is to “recover” it.

Recovering time requires a mindset. Most of us see our schedule like this: morning rush, work, quick lunch, more work, get-home-and-get-kids-and-get-dinner, collapse on the sofa. Instead, start looking for those windows where things slow down, you’re waiting for other people, or you have a break. You can occasionally find ten or fifteen minutes in one segment, and you might actually find half an hour or more once in a while.

Here are some useful and energizing ways to use those little chunks of recovered time:

· Start a To-Do list of things you can do with a few minutes of recovered time.

· Make 1 phone call. Depending on the length of the conversation or if you just leave a message, you might be able to make 3 or 4!

· Work with a mind-map for developing ideas. Learn how here.

· Write a page or a scene in your novel or short story.

· Write an outline or rough draft of an article.

· Research a topic, a business, a person, or a training program on the internet.

· Send e-mail to a mentor or potential mentor to get information, guidance, and support.

· Occasionally, use the time to do something specific and focused for relaxation so you have energy throughout the day.

· Sketch.

· Compose music.

· Work on your product design.

· Listen to an audio program on a CD or an MP3 player while driving.

· Listen to an audio program on an MP3 player or on your computer while doing routine tasks.

· Read an article on a topic related to the area you intend to change in your life.

· Add to your list of factors in your “dream life” to help you choose work and hobbies that bring enjoyment and fulfillment.

· Pull out your day planner and schedule half-hour to one-hour blocks each day to read, both for enjoyment and for training, growth, and development.

· Write a Blog-Zine entry! Okay, I threw this one in because my goal was to take just 15 minutes for this one since a lot of my articles are over a page long. Mission accomplished!

This month I asked a colleague, Sarah Sharp, to write an article for this section of the Blog-Zine. Sarah has an exceptional telcourse she offers about simplifying your life by focusing your time, energy, and commitment on things that align with your mission. Enjoy! –Steve

We only have one head, but most of us have too many hats. Our society tells us that multi-tasking is the only way to get things done, so the more hats we can wear at once, the better. We get so busy planning and coordinating, running and supporting, heading up and volunteering, we end up with our heads spinning and the hats falling all around us. All of us, at some point, get caught up in the hustle and bustle of life; we lose sight of why we are here and what is important. I’m not talking about the meaning of life for all humanity, though that may play into it. I am speaking of what you, as an individual, value and desire, what you want to contribute to the people in your circle of influence – a personal mission statement.

A mission statement that summarizes your core values and how you exercise those values in your daily living can vastly simplify your life and de-clutter your calendar. It gives you a standard by which to measure the worthiness of an activity, position, or any decision which would require your valuable and finite resources of time, energy, or finances.

Ask yourself, the next time someone is asking for time, attention, or money from you, “Does this request honor my life’s mission?” For example, if your mission is teaching children, do you have the time and resources to support adult literacy? The answer may be no. Is it a worthy cause? Most definitely. But I am willing to wager that someone else’s life mission encompasses what yours doesn’t, and it will all work out in the end.

Saying no to worthy causes just because they are not your #1 passion may seem selfish and cause false guilt; however, saying no to other things opens up your resources to pour yourself into the things you really have a heart for. When you are working at what you are passionate about, you do not burn out as quickly, your enthusiasm spreads to others, and more work gets done for that good thing that you are truly here to contribute to the world. So, find your mission for your life, and live it!
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Sarah Sharp, Personal Life Coach, has made it her mission to help unite people with their fullest potential, and then teach them to do the same for others. She is available for individual coaching, group coaching, and speaking engagements. Her clients find focus, motivation, confidence, and the power for sustainable change. She is especially passionate for helping ministry and volunteer leaders and organizations, and people in crisis and life transition. To learn more or to receive a complimentary one-on-one coaching session, please contact Sarah at (608) 516-3256 or sarah@amostexcellentway.com.

Q-How do you eat an elephant?
A-One bite at a time!
Q-What if you get bored eating elephant?
A-Make elephant burgers!

One of the discussions on the Fast Track Your Dream forum for people in creative career transition brought up the question of finding time in a busy schedule to take steps towards a goal. One memorable response came from a member who raised the iconic question: How do you eat an elephant?

This led to other questions from people who generally thought they wouldn’t like the taste of elephant or would get tired of eating it. We even heard a response from a vegetarian. Okay, all metaphors have limits! But the key idea is strong.

One of the creative members wrote a post about finding a few minutes here and a half hour there in her busy schedule by keeping focused on the task of finding time. She had her list of items and could do ten minutes of phone calls or fifteen minutes of web research or a half hour organizing thoughts for a project. She referred to these isolated steps taken during recaptured time as elephant burgers. I love the image and have extended it to include the answer to the question of overcoming boredom or the feeling of overwhelm with a big project.

Elephant burgers means using creativity and mindfulness to take a large or ongoing project, break it into individual steps that can be accomplished, and keep yourself motivated and accountable so you move forward. It combines organization and planning with fun and sometimes whimsy.

I’m not a smashing success at this. I use the idea with success, but then fall back into old ways. For example, I used to have large stacks of paper and debit card receipts (personal, not business, because I save those for deductions) piling up around my shredder. I would sit down and take an hour or so to shred it all, especially with un-jamming the shredder and waiting for it to cool down after several minutes of constant use.

Then I decided to shred just ten items per day until they were gone. It worked! The shredder didn’t overheat and the pile went down, although some days I added to it. I had small piles of “confetti” that were fun to recycle instead of bulky bags full of shreds. What a system! It worked for many weeks.

Now I have two small piles slowly building on top of my shredder and recycle basket again. I stopped using my system and went back to old ways. But I have a simple plan that worked before and I can conquer this elephant one burger at a time. Today I shredded my cleared debit card receipts from last month, nearly twenty. Tomorrow I’ll shred ten unsolicited credit card applications. Those are fun! At this rate, the pile should be gone in a week or two.