Fly on the E-Commerce Cyberwall

How to Overcome Obstacles? Just Get Started
I'm in a celebratory mood, and it's not just from the first of my out-of-town kids arriving home for Christmas last night. My mood comes from an important business-building truth that I relearned this morning. It's a truth that can help you, too. I'll explain what it is after I set the scene that brought it about.

While my wife and my daughters went off for a little bonding time today (over shopping, of course) I decided to tackle one of the projects I've been procrastinating over for months.
I've long been embarassed by the awkward navigation that One Stop Web Support has had due to letting it develop without adequate planning. Visitors got around through a variety of channels that had sprouted up independent of each other.

I wanted to organize everything in a simpler navigation scheme, but every time I sat down to plan it out, I felt overwhelmed. There were so many pieces that I didn't know where to begin. When I sat down the other night to lay out my final plan, I got discouraged when it called for scrapping everything in all those channels and adding thirty new pages, all extensive and all written from scratch.

But it didn't have to be so.

This morning, I decided I would attack it by simply cutting and pasting material from the existing channels into seven new pages that would form the backbone of the navigation. I gave myself four hours to get it done. It wouldn't be perfect, but it would be worlds better than what I had.

Guess what? I got it all done within the time I had given myself. Sure, there's more work I need to do, but now everything is divided up into an intuitive basic structure. Everything has a common format. I can attack each section individually to smooth out the remaining glitches instead of struggling with a massive assortment of different structures and formats.

I promised that there was a lesson for you in this story, though. It's this: many times it's better to simply get started than to wait until every "i" is dotted and every "t" crossed. My work on the navigation is nowhere near complete. But it's a LOT farther along than it was yesterday. And it's a lot easier for people to use than if I left it like it was while I continued to plan.

When approaching a big task, a lot of times you need to make just enough of plan to get you going and then dig in. You can always refine your plan as your work takes shape.
Jeff

Labels: goals, mindset, motivation