A lot of people seem to misunderstand the idea of going with the flow. 

To go with the flow does not mean to let things fall apart.

It does not mean to accept whatever is left over after everyone else has taken what they want.

As in all things, there is a matter of balance involved. We have to integrate the different polarities available. 

The reason people talk about going with the flow is because in cultures where the idea arose there is a tendency to be too tightly constrict at the opposite pole. People are too structured, scripted, and pre-planned.

But your life will be a mess if you don't maintain any structure in it. Too much of either pole will cost you.

## What Balance Looks Like
<br>I'm not that busy these days, and have many years of having maintained a pretty good balance between structure and flow even when I was really busy. So for me the right balance comes pretty naturally now. It wasn't always that way though. It wasn't that long ago that the only way I could create this balance was to use tools, specifically productivity tools.

There are lots of different kinds made to work with different people's minds and the kinds of activity they're trying to self-manage to complete, but the basic thing you're looking for is something that helps you know when you must do something TODAY or when you've done everything you need to for now and have free time.

That's the essential thing. ***When do you have free time without sacrificing achievement of your goals or fulfillment of your responsibilities?***

This clarity is essential, because otherwise you always feel stress. Even when you're relaxing there is this pervading sense of things left undone. You don't know what these things are, but it just feels like something might be falling apart while you sit there. So your attention is rarely present and you are rarely fully enjoying yourself.

Or if you aren't plagued by the responsibility pole, you really do let things fall apart. You're too relaxed and don't realize when you need to be moving into action. You may be someone who is always starting things, but never achieving your goals.

There are periods in all of our lives where we simply have a lot of drudgery that just needs to get done, today. And failing to do so creates a lot more work and maybe serious problems, or prevents us from ever achieving anything in life.

## <center>Having something prompt you when it is time to act and comfort you when you really don't need to be doing anything in particular is an incredible benefit.</center>
<br>It allows you to have a peaceful, fulfilling, productive life that you enjoy living.

But before any tool can serve you, you have to know what instructions to give it. That means you've got to get organized mentally first, then take the time to enter that information into the tool(s).

## Getting There
<br>Yesterday I delivered what will likely be my last training on this subject. A friend is on maternity leave so asked a bunch of her friends in the same industry to offer trainings to her clients while she's gone. All I had to do was show up online at the appointed time and teach a subject I've taught many times before. Easy.

The core of the training was this process of getting organized. In a nutshell it comes down to this:

1. Do a braindump of all the goals you're working toward, all the things you hope to accomplish in the next few months. <br><br>Don't worry about what you want to accomplish after that. Just focus on the immediate future. And be sure not to mix in tasks with goals. Tasks are activities you engage in, but they should add up to goals. Tasks don't really have meaning in and of themselves. So first clarify the goals, so that the activities you engage in actually move you toward them. <br><br>Goals might be getting a book published, planning a major event, organizing a community project, getting into a degree program to prepare you for a job in a new industry, etc. Anything that takes 2-6 months to achieve. <br><br>(Less than that and you won't have time to complete the following process. More than that and you'll just have too much you're biting off all at once. Multi-year goals, for example, need to be broken down into incremental 3-6 month goals.)

2. Prioritize those goals so that you have no more than 3 to work toward right now.

3. Take the first goal on your top 3 list and clarify what some indicators of achieving that goal would be. Write all of this down as you go.<br><br>Before the goal is achieved, while you're still working toward it, what would good performance toward the goal look like?<br><br>How would you know that you are in fact performing in a way that is likely to lead to your achieving the goal in time, or NOT making progress despite all your activity? What are some signs along the way that things are progressing adequately or not? (I'll give an example later that will make it easier to do this critical step that people normally skip.)

4. Once you've clarified your indicators for good performance, break down each one into the daily/weekly/monthly actions you need to complete to achieve each one. These actions are what you will put into your productivity management software to guide you toward achievement of your goals without having to hold all that stuff in your head all the time. 

 <br>Then all you're doing is letting the software guide you. When I was really busy I personally used 3 tools: an online calendar for anything due at a specific time, Toodledo for tasks that just need to get done sometime on a given day (especially for recurring tasks, that need to be done daily, weekly or monthly), and a CRM for business relationship stuff like forms submitted, meetings that are meant to advance a deal, etc. (You would only need a CRM if you're in business.)<br><br> I got a lot accomplished with just those 3 tools. And I had a lot of free time that I could actually enjoy because I knew without a doubt that it really was FREE time, not costing me anything later.

## Example
<br>Let's say the goal that I chose to work on was enrolling people in a paid in-person workshop occurring a few months from now. There are quite a number of indicators I should have long before the final day of registration to let me know if I was progressing toward a full workshop and the revenue goals I would have for considering it a successful enrollment campaign. I certainly don't want to wait until the last few days and see that I'm nowhere near my targets. It would be too late to do anything by then.

Or if a month out I see that I'm way ahead, I might want to plan for more attendees than I first thought I would have. Perhaps I would need to rent a bigger space or find an assistant to help me with some of the onsite logistics. 

None of this is possible if I don't know what "on track," "ahead," or "behind" actually look like as I work over the months leading up to the event. 

Think of it as the Hot/Cold game you probably played as a kid. Someone would hide something and then you would look for it. So long as the person accurately called out "You're getting warmer" when you were headed toward the hidden object, and "You're getting colder" when you were headed away from it, you would ALWAYS find the object. Well assuming you could play long enough anyway. (In business, playing long enough means you don't run out of money before you "find" success.)

## <center>So in our real lives we're looking for those indicators that we're getting warmer or colder.</center>
<br>These indicators are needed for each of the aspects of good performance we clarified. So let's say one aspect of good performance I know to look for is a larger email list. Since I'll have the most attention to the promotional material when people are reading emails sent about it, a larger email list means more people will really understand what the event has to offer them.

A higher email open rate will also matter. More people on the list means little if no one is reading the emails.

Other things I might care about are visitors to the website page about the event (increasing that number), shares on social media, new members of a social media group I create around the topic of the workshop, and so on. Seeing all these numbers going up means I'm getting warmer. Seeing the numbers stay pretty much the same (or grow, but at a decreasing rate) would mean I was getting colder.

Once I'm clear what progress looks like, I need to flesh out what actions I will take to move each of these numbers in the right direction. I take one at a time, starting with increasing the mailing list size, and write out the tasks I need to complete to do that thing.

So perhaps for growing the email list I'll create a 7 Day Challenge. People eat those things up. I don't know why, because I never complete challenges and don't want more things on my To Do list, but for whatever reason, a lot of people love them. It is the surest way to grow an email list quickly right now.

Well doing that Challenge has a lot of activities that go with it. Each one is a task under growing the email list. You have to create the website page for the Challenge, create the opt-in box that leads to the mailing list with a tag that makes it clear it's for the Challenge, use that tag to trigger an automation that sends out the Challenge emails, then write additional emails that go only to people who've completed the Challenge making the connection between what they just accomplished in the Challenge and how the workshop you're selling will help them build on that success.

These are just the high level tasks. Some of these steps have sub-steps as well. All of this has to go into your productivity software so that once you plan it once, you don't have to keep going back to this. You don't have to keep wondering, "Am I doing everything I need to do to get this done on time?" You plan it, put it into the software, then let yourself be guided day by day.

If this is sounding like a lot, you're right. And that's why you feel so overwhelmed every time you go to take on a multi-month task. You still have to do all of this to make it a success. You just aren't doing it in an organized way. It's all swimming around in your head 24-7, plaguing you. And you never feel secure, because you really do realize you need to do some things long after you should have done them.

There really are a lot of steps in doing big projects well. Organizing it just means you're more likely to have all that effort add up to success.

Any way, after you do this with the first goal on your top 3 list, go back and do it again with the other two. And feel free to have only one thing you're working on from that list in any 3 month period. You can always push back the other priorities until after you've completed the first one, so that you only ever work on one big thing at a time. Life is long, with lots of time to get many 3 month projects done in succession. And there are no bonus points for running yourself into the ground.

## Tracking
<br>It's also important to measure your progress periodically. You may have planned out all these activities that are supposed to move the numbers in the right direction, but are they? You only know if you look.

So having some sort of tracking system is vital. I just used spreadsheets. I would have a row for each of the performance goals I mentioned previously (increasing the mailing list subscribers, open rate, group size, etc.) then a column for each week. One task I would put into my productivity software (in this case Toodledo) would be to go in every Friday and look at those numbers wherever they are collected and copy them into that spreadsheet. Then I'd look to see that the numbers are going up from week to week.

If they are, great. If they're going up more than anticipated, really great! If they are staying about the same, or growing, but at a decreasing rate, something needs to change. I need to go back to planning and rethink things.

Perhaps I need to add some new tasks under one of my performance goals. Or maybe I need to remove some things so that I have more time to do the things that are making the biggest difference.

Once I make these adjustments in my productivity software, I continue tracking progress. If I see the numbers start behaving, great. If I don't, then back to the revisions board I go. 

Over and over, I keep doing what works with confidence, and revise when I see that something isn't working.

If you do this, no matter what you're trying to achieve, if you keep playing long enough you absolutely WILL achieve success.

In our example, we have a deadline of the workshop date. So we have to hope we started the process far enough in advance and had good enough educated guesses in our early plans to have the time to adjust, adjust, adjust as needed for success. If not, then we wind up with a smaller enrollment than we wanted, but lots of experience we can use to plan better the next time. So in that sense, the game never ends and we never really run out of time, so long as we decide we still want to play.

## In Summary
<br>I'm giving an example from business because it is the subject that requires an endless series of goals that people need to accomplish to run a successful business, and is also the subject I know the most about. But really this could be anything you're trying to accomplish.

Maybe you want to write a book and get it published.

Maybe you want to create a flourishing, healthy garden.

Maybe you'd like to create a community garden.

Or perhaps you're just planning a vacation, or a graduation party for your kid, or anything that takes time to put together and where things going "well" means something to you.

This is the process that can make sure you achieve it, and with much less stress along the way.

It's more mental work up front, but it saves so much mental effort later.

And just as importantly, it ensures that you can truly go with the flow much of the time, because all the key structural points in your life needed for fulfilling achievement are being maintained.

You get to live a life of both daily ease AND lots of major achievements. Pretty enticing? Well then give it a try, and feel free to ask for my help in the comments. 

This is actually a 2 month process I used to take clients through, so don't be discouraged if it's a little challenging as you start, or if you need to ask for help. I'm really sincere in my offer to help you flesh out these details for whatever you're trying to achieve.

![deadline-2636259_1280.jpg](https://ipfs.busy.org/ipfs/QmUuPtnTnFFLLcy5UKecQH7VbAsfnKjL82dYhaHp8Aj2Yj)
*(Photo source: [Pixabay](https://pixabay.com/en/deadline-stopwatch-clock-time-2636259/))*

*Resteems always appreciated*