How I Mitigate Future Stress
Reading Time: 3 minutes Howdy Family ????????♂️,
For the past 3 weeks, I’ve been home 95% of the time. The crazy thing is that the weather has been getting warmer as the days go by. If you didn’t know I love me some 30+ & 40+ Celcius days.
Needless to say, I was very much a happy camper being in the house all day. I fell into one of my “in the cave” moments. An “in the cave” moment is when you stay in the house and just bang out work. I know I know “all work and no play makes Chris a dull boy” Let me explain to you why I was happy the entire time.
Currently, I am a one-man show with a full-time job, freelance web designer, web hosting provider, Podcast (editor, scheduler, interviewer, recruiting, etc.), Content Creator, and social life.
As someone who thinks about the future all the time, I was able to forecast the path I was on was going to lead to stress-filled days. And well with a goal of making it to 120 years old, I need to dodge stress like Amazon dodges taxes. ???? (if you don’t know what I am talking about check out this dope video here)
How exactly am I working on mitigating future stress?
I start off by looking at all the things I am doing and ask myself one question “which of the tasks has the highest probability of something going wrong that is out of my control?” It comes down to freelance website design and Podcasting.
Podcasting
These are the 2 variables heavily dependent on someone else. In podcasting, the variable I have no control over is a guest needing to reschedule. This leaves me with diminishing the amount of time it takes, to edit the audio format, edit the video to create snippets, create the podcast & magazine cover, rewatch the interview to timestamp the important parts, and schedule the social media posts.
I can say with the 3 weeks I have been able to chop off 30 minutes of my editing and scheduling time. The next step in this is to create a process so that I can outsource the work.
Freelance Web Design
With freelance web design, the biggest factor I came across here is clients not getting all their content (images & copy) ready to start building the site. The last thing I want is to be waiting for one photo to have a new site up and running. Or worst yet a client’s site gets hit with a virus or being hacked.
To mitigate that future stress, I have worked on building a process to make the customer journey as easy and frictionless as possible. I call it the Amazon experience in that at each step of the journey the client knows where they are at all times.
To mitigate the chance of a client’s site being hacked, I’ve built in several backup systems and learn enough to know where to go if things really get wild. I have to be honest I know the number of hours it can take to fix a hacked site, and I am not trying to lose my sleep for that.
But, why is this fun for you?
The fun for me is having spent time now to make sure the future Chris Latham can enjoy life with less stress. As much as I love to be present I also understand I don’t want to get old and have to work as hard as I am now. If I zoom out 3 weeks is barely a blink of an eye.
One of the things that always happens when I enter “in the cave” is my social life goes right out the window. If I am, to be honest, I am totally fine with that. I know that people who are closest to me know that how I feel for them doesn’t change. What I love about the deep friendships I have is that we could not talk for 2 years and reconnect like we were apart for 24 hours.
If you get anything out of this. I ask you one thing
What can you do today to mitigate future stress?
Chris “In The Cave” Latham ✌????
