The power of editing...learn it by watching Bravo TV

Watching TV is a dangerous trap that seems to creep up during my strongest bouts of procrastination. What I should have been doing this morning was writing, but instead I was slipping into the vortex that is Bravo TV. While the ideals of entrepreneurship will always be my first passion, I get so easily sucked into anything that relates to fashion because as a concept, it's self-gratifying and liberating...much like entrepreneurship. My love affair with the world of fashion is especially dangerous when Project Runway reruns and the vintage clothing category on eBay are, respectively, a channel change and mouse click away...

Halfway through the end of the season finale of The Fashion Show, my boyfriend called to reprimand me for my fashion-induced lack of focus, given I hadn't updated my blog all weekend (apparently he's an avid reader). Though I knew he was totally right, there was something about today's episode that felt like more than mindless TV. Here I was, in awe of one of the contestant's fashion collection only to watch all of the judges shoot her down for lack of consistency. At first I disagreed with the judges criticisms as I felt the contestant had designed brilliant clothes with lots of interesting patterns and shapes, but it wasn't until the last judge made her comments that I suddenly "got it".

I paraphrase, but the judge said to the contestant, "What you've done with your work is create lots of beautiful, interesting chapters. I worry; however, that with all of these brilliant pieces that you've lost the storyline. You've forgot how to edit."

I never expected to find today's post topic from reality TV, but what that judge said was genius. So often as ambitious, spritely, young adults we dive head first into a lot of truly exceptional projects only to lose the "storyline" of our true goals. I am so, so, SO guilty of this as I am blessed and cursed to be pretty good at a lot of different things. If we want to be truly successful at the things that mean the most to us, we really have to learn what it means to edit and ratchet our efforts down.

A great article on this is The Power of One, from Life Learning Today (via Leo Babauta of Zenhabits.com). This article suggests that you rank all of your goals in order of importance, then work solely on the most important one until it is accomplished, then move down to the next one. Essentially, this method is the debt snowball of goal setting.

While I agree that you have to create a hierarchy for goals if you ever hope to complete any of them, working on one at a time is just too limiting for me as there is a lot that I want to accomplish. My method for editing is to choose one goal per category in your life to accomplish at a time. The trick is then to pick goals that still relate to the other categories. For example, I have a goal of finding an effective workout routine that I can do on a consistent basis. Though this would fall under the "health" category in my life, it's related to my productivity and spirituality goals. In other words, its okay to work on more than one goal at a time as long as you're being incestuous about it; keep it all related. If you're really determined, keeping everything in an excel spreadsheet or a simple notebook can help.

I know all this goal talk may seem geeky some, but it's really important to continuously edit yourself so that you can keep all of your energy focused. Had that contestant learned that, she might have had the winning collection.

Had I learned that, I might have had this post written a whole lot sooner.