Sometimes the price that you pay outweighs the benefits you get in return. The 18-hour work for extra dollars and the 3-hour internet searching for coupons and discounts for saving a few pounds belong to this category. We plan exotic trips to god-forsaken places but the long flight journeys, visa issues, and poor accommodation make the fancy beach and unique flora and fauna pointless. The promotion might be good but sadly the trading off of family and personal time might not be.
Restrictions
Once you devised a plan, try to put as many restraints as possible in terms of time, money, place, infrastructure, people, technology, and others that you can think of. This actually improves your plan and subtracts unnecessary deviations and extra resources we added without any need.
If you have put the time restriction and are forced to complete much sooner then automatically a smart idea pops up in the mind suiting the constraint. Try to go as hard as you can and increase the pressure on the plan. In the end, you can’t help but improve the original game plan you had on the board. Restrictions move the needle!
Learn and Leap
What I learned after many trials and errors and mishaps is that one should not chase success right away.
Michael Watkins puts it perfectly in his context- ” There’s a lot you don’t know and in fact, there may be lots you don’t even know that you don’t know. The time before you actually start is a really crucial time when you should focus on preparing yourself.” Bias for action is good because we usually use planning as a decoy to procrastinate but jumping into the ocean without any clue about the depth is suicidal. If you think over-preparation is bad then under-preparation too is equally bad. Before you start the game, understand the rules, exceptions, variables (Big and small), information, and data that might increase the odds of winning by a few percentage points. The roadmap from the start to the end will save you.
Thy Vox 