13. The Weekly - Creating Order

On gaining control, great hangs and stylish bugs.

Mar 24, 2025

If you need a laugh

Sometimes I just cannot listen to another business podcast (yes even I). And for that reason I love that Amy Poehler’s podcast starts with a declaration that “I’m not here to change your life and I don’t care if you get any better”.

But nothing makes you feel better than a good hang and incidentally I did feel like I learnt more about creative leadership (so I believe it still counts as personal development if you’d like to watch it during work hours).

Unlikely collaborators

Caddisfly Larvae live in lakes and make cocoons with whatever they can find in their environment. Artist Hubert Duprat provided them with some new building materials and the results are amazing.

“After first learning about caddisflies, self-taught artist Hubert Duprat had a thought. Had a caddisfly ever naturally encountered a fleck of gold in a river and used it to build a home? And then one step further: what if a caddisfly had only gold and other precious stones or jewels to work with?” - Source

Quick Thoughts

Fixed, Flexible and Free

Not every business process can be up for improvement every week. You need some established parameters to avoid spinning wheels and indecision. Consider what is ‘fixed’, ‘flexible’ and ‘free’. Don’t add more processes, meetings or reports, instead consider what can be stripped back and simplified.

Focus on improving one system or process at a time, focusing on those areas where you will gain the most value from improvement. Drive your improvement all the way to completion before starting on something new.

Importance, Urgency and a Secret Third Thing

The best way to regain control of a chaotic day is to prioritise. When you have multiple people coming to you with queries, issues and problems, your instinct might be to try and solve everything for everyone as quickly as possible - which can leave you feeling overwhelmed, scattered and out of control.

A quick and easy way to gauge priority is to consider importance and urgency. You might have seen something that looks like this before.

Important tasks - it’s worth doing but it doesn’t need to happen right this second, so schedule time for it and provide an update on when it will be done.

Important & Urgent tasks - let’s get it done! Provide a timeframe if it’s not an instant fix and let people know you’re on to it.

Urgent tasks - Delegate it. You might have rolled your eyes at this one (it’s okay, I did too). If you’re a one man band, or you can’t delegate this task to anyone, consider the importance, and add it to your to-do list in the appropriate order.

For example - your client’s website is down, you better jump on to that straight away. Your client wants to change the card stock for an upcoming print run, it can probably wait until after your meeting.

Remember that urgent is not the same thing as important, and importance is relative to your own list of tasks.

Now here is the secret third thing which is really helpful for improving the flow of your tasks and processes - information.

Specifically do you have all the information you need to be able to action that task? If not, asking for that information as soon as the request comes in means that you’ll be ready to hit the ground running when you do turn your attention to the task.

Do you find yourself doing the same tasks over and over or asking for the same information every time? You might need to Automate your Admin.

—

That’s it for this week! As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments, or DM me if you’re shy.