It's an essential process

Framework, scaffolding. Stuff that supports and holds up other stuff. Whatever you want to call it. When my son was receiving speech therapy, they would constantly talk about scaffolding in the program. The smart ass in me says quietly, turn it up, we're not building a house here!

But as I listened and I learned and I told the cheeky part of my personality to pipe down, I looked at how they built a system that supported the training and the program as a whole.

Last night, I prepared my own scaffolding.

From many years of experience, I've started to learn the predictable nature of my personality so plan accordingly. I know that when my son wakes me up at 4.30am each morning, I will have a deep desire to go back to sleep. Certainly not put on my shoes and head outside.

So I laid out all my gear the night before and as I was staring in the mirror at bloodshot eyes after about 5 hours of sleep and my brain was screaming at me to go back to bed, I simply put my gear on and walked out the door.

I've dissected it every which way and the only way to build in an exercise routine is to get up another hour earlier. I generally start my workday at 6.00am, as I find it most efficient to crank out some writing, then sales reports and emails before 7.00am so then I can help to get the family out the door in the next hour, then drop my son at kindy and be at the office by 9.00am.

My days are filled with back to back meetings and rushing from one place to another. This week will be particularly crazy, as we are finishing the move from West End to Annerley. The office has to be operational on the 1st of November. I say operational rather than ready, as we still have a few things to do, but the main work is done.

We've repainted the offices, rebuilt the bathrooms and the kitchen and added about 5kg of putty to the most uneven walls I've ever seen. It's been a wild six weeks as we prepare.

Today we have the hilarious task of disassembling our 1997 Sega Rally 2 machine. It weighs about half a tonne, so needs to be broken down into its components, as we need to get the arcade game down a flight of stairs, then across town and up another. The tech will be on-site at 9.00am to start pulling it apart. I'm going to set a timelapse camera!

The only way I can organise my workdays is through careful planning and allocation of time to what is important, not just what is urgent as I look to lead the company in the direction I've planned.

As part of my journey learning about self-care, I have to make the same steps. The hard part is that the only way to prioritise this. Eric Thomas is famous for saying "most of you don't want success as badly as you want to sleep."

Mate, after getting to bed at 11.30 then waking up a few times for my boy then getting up at 4.30am, you're damn right at that moment, I don't want success... I want some more sleep!

That's why I have to build a support structure. Right now it's just cracked 7.03am here in Brisbane and I'm already about half an hour behind, having now yet done my sales reports. However, I'm absolutely pumped that the plans I put in place last night got me out of the house and this morning I did a lap up and down Mt Cootha. From here I can refine the process and build in the additional minutes to get me right back on time.

Being only 30 minutes behind schedule is still a pretty good result in my opinion.

Got to thank the scaffolding for holding the framework up.

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