All You Need is a Grease Board

I’ll admit it- I’m a planner.  In both my personal life as well as my business life, I like to plan.  I may as well confess that I still keep a paper calendar too.  Before you start pinging me with notes asking me to join you in the all-electronic 21^st century, let me explain that I use both an e-calendar as well as a paper calendar.  The e-calendar is glorious in that I’m notified of meetings and it’s easily accessible with a smart phone. Yet the paper version is more important to me. It’s like keeping a journal that includes both personal and work-related stuff.  This may seem like double work to many, yet for me it’s a link to all that’s happened in my life.  I save the paper calendars and have fun looking at them occasionally to see what happened oh-so-many years ago.

Sounds like all I do is plan, huh? Don’t get me wrong. There’s a part of me that loves being spontaneous and free, especially in my social life.  Hubby and I are THE WORST at planning for weekend fun, so spontaneity in this area is great.  It’s the other part of me – the business side – that wants to think things through in advance.   My comfort level increases if I’ve had time to strategize, look at different scenarios and truly understand the situation as well as possible outcomes.  Flying by the seat of my pants is not in my comfort zone when it comes to business decisions.

So you can imagine my distress when I was laid-off.  I found planning to be more difficult without a work setting.  Maybe it’s because meetings and deadlines just naturally happen at the office.  Not so much when you’re adjusting to life as a professional job-seeker.  Thank goodness I discovered my passion for writing.  As CEO of my blog, I imposed deadlines to keep me on schedule, which in turn helped me schedule job search activities.

Then I had the crazy idea to write a book.  Seemed simple enough, so I tried to incorporate that into my schedule. It turns out that writing was the easy part.  It was everything else that had me puzzled.  Questions plagued me: what are the steps to publishing, where do you get an editor, how will I fund this project, how does one distribute a book, much less promote it?  So I went back to my roots, planning with paper and pen, or in this case, a grease board.

Similar to writing plans on a paper calendar, writing things out on a board helped me sort through the questions as well as the things I already knew and basically make a plan.  A plan to publish a book.  This was terrifying to me, because I knew that once there was a written plan where I could see it, it was time to sink or swim.  If I didn’t follow through, my written plan would be a nasty reminder that I had failed.  And failure, to me, was not an option.

Even though my plan seemed ridiculous (what did I know about writing a book?), I started scribbling. My beautiful grease board, full of boxes and lines and words.  New career goals were also positioned on this board; hopes and dreams.  The board was placed in the garage in front of my car so every time I pulled in or backed out I had to look at it.  A big reminder not to fail.

And you know what? All that planning I learned early in my career paid off.  Book? Done!  Speaking engagements? Done! Board member? Done!  Even the ticky-tacky details are done.  And with all this planning came job opportunities.  The lesson here is that even those of us in The Land of Layoff need a plan.

I used to say, “Plan the work and work the plan”.  Guess I’m going to brush off that saying and use it again.