These days, it’s very common to read a lot about the incredible benefits of becoming an entrepreneur, starting up your own business, and going freelance. In fact, any or all of these career trajectories are often treated as victories in and of themselves.
Of course, there really are some potentially profound benefits to starting up your own business or escaping the rat race – not least of all the fact that you become the master of your own time in a much more direct sense.
The downside? A significant increase in the amount of chaos you face in your professional life.
Chaos can be a very destructive force in the wrong doses and contexts – which is why companies such as Microsoft CRM partner – ebecs offer systems to help manage it.
Here are a few reasons why it’s important to reduce the chaos you face professionally.
- Because the more chaotic things become, the greater the amount of stress you will be exposed to – and that’s a dangerous path to be on
When there’s less of a clear path forward in whatever it is you’re doing, and when things are far less stable and predictable, you will be more stressed. That’s just the way it goes.
Our bodies’ stress response is intimately connected with our “fight or flight response.” And that response is all about helping us to prevail over uncertain and risky situations and environments.
When there is some structure to your working life, you can afford to relax a bit more. You know roughly what you need to do on any given day, and you have a reasonable likelihood of still being employed a month from now.
When those certainties vanish, you start tossing and turning at night, wondering if you’ll be able to keep the bills paid in the near future
2. Because to make headway, you first need to have a clear target in mind, and a relatively clear path ahead
“Progress” always implies a goal. You can never progress towards anything unless you’ve defined the thing it is you’re trying to obtain or reach.
The thing is, a goal implies a degree of structure – and certainly requires a degree of structure, in order to be achieved. No one is likely to successfully pay off a mortgage without having a personal budgeting system in place.
The more chaotic your working situation is, the less likely you are to enjoy that fundamental sense of making progress towards something meaningful. That, in turn, can mean a sense of stagnation and fear.
3. Because it is easiest to benefit from a degree of uncertainty and turmoil when you first have a strong foundation to work with
There are all sorts of ways in which people can benefit from a degree of uncertainty and turmoil. Creative and flexible entrepreneurs often manage to spur dramatic innovation in uncertain environments and take the world by storm.
But it’s one thing to capitalise on a chaotic environment when you already have a strong foundation to work with, and it’s another thing altogether to dive head-first into a chaotic working environment and to try to create something out of nothing.
Develop a powerfully productive structure first and foremost, and then venture out into the unknown and try to create something daring and new.
