The First Three Punches

I plan my week on a glass wall.

White marker, days across it, everything I intend to get through written where I have to look at it. It is a good system and it has never once been accurate.

Something more urgent arrives. Something takes twice the time I gave it. Something turns out to need a resource I do not have yet. After a few years of this I stopped treating the gap as a personal failure and started treating it as information. The list is a plan; the week is a negotiation.

Which is why I think the first punch matters more than the plan does.

Where do you begin when you don’t know where to start?

Not with the most important thing. With three different kinds of move.

In business I think in terms of the first three steps, or in my own language, the first three punches. When someone cannot tell me what theirs should be, I ask them to find three different kinds of move:

1. Something you can do now. Inside your current capacity, where you already hold the money, the hours and the expertise.
2. Something that must be done. Whether or not you are the one to do it.
3. Something you want to do. The step that generates energy rather than spending it.

You do not need one from every category. But when you are stuck, those three questions usually shake something loose.

Something I can do now

Mine right now is a single document I keep calling my one source of truth. I have a lot in motion. A knowledge bank, the operating systems behind it, the studio’s website rebuilt, this site being built, a site for TISCU Consulting to come, and thelifeexchange.net which I put up about a month ago. Once that many things exist, they start disagreeing with each other. How many years have we been doing this. What exactly does this term mean. Which version of that story is the correct one.

So the fix is one document that settles all of it. When I open a new working session, I hand it that file first, and everything downstream is working from the same facts. It is unglamorous, and it is entirely within my power to finish, which is the whole point.

Something that must be done

I am hiring a media relations manager. Media is the work I came up in and I still love it; I am a media and PR strategist by trade. But I do not have the hours to pitch continuously and keep sixty relationships warm while running everything else. That work does not stop mattering because my calendar is full.

The question is not always whether you can do something. Often the better question is whether it needs doing, and who is the right person to do it.

Something I want to do

Mine is training strategists. I will be working with more clients this year and next, and I need strategists to do it. Strategists are not cheap; I know, because I am one. So I am putting time into training people early, teaching them to see through the lens I use, so that eventually they can carry projects beside me. It turns what I know into capacity.

It is also the part of the week I look forward to, and I have stopped apologizing for that being a reason. A step you want to take generates energy, and energy is a real input even when it does not appear anywhere in the plan.

What do you do when everything feels urgent?

Start with consequence, then check what you can actually control. They are not the same test.

Urgency is my first tiebreaker; the thing with consequences attached goes first. But urgency alone is not enough.

An environmental permit can be the most urgent item on my board and still not be something I can hold next week. Processing time is not mine to control. No amount of wanting it moves the queue.

In my own system I mark things as locked, glimpsed, unlocked or accomplished, and something can sit at glimpsed while being genuinely urgent. I can see it. I know it connects to three other things. I cannot act on it yet.

That distinction saved me a lot of unnecessary frustration, because it separates two very different failures. One is not having done the thing. The other is not being able to do the thing yet. A delay you do not control is not a verdict on your competence, and reading it as one will cost you the energy you need for the items that are actually open.

So I defer it. I keep it visible. I keep working toward the day it unlocks.

And if everything that is both urgent and actionable is still more than I can carry, I use the last filter. What do I actually want to do. The rest can be deferred, delegated, outsourced, or kept in sight until it becomes something a person can act on.

So now is not a to-do list; it is a filter.

What is urgent.

Then, what can I actually do.

And if there is still too much, what do I actually want to do?