When I’m helping someone navigate a challenging situation, there’s a moment when the person finds the courage and clarity to state their case plainly.

“I just wish I could tell him that it upsets me when he says that. Even though I know it’s my problem, it still bothers me, and maybe if he knew that, he could find a different thing to say.”

“I see lots of people making this particular mistake, and I want to tell them that I could help them resolve it.”

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“I am trying to learn problem-solving skills. Do you have any recommendations?”

I received this question on one of my very favorite topics from a reader of this blog. (Thank you!)

My answer is very simple: I learned problem-solving skills through solving problems.

Each problem required certain resources and tools to solve it. And then, once I solved it, I had those resources and tools to use on the next problem.

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Starting the workday used to mean opening my email app.

My tasks and activities would be dictated by whatever was waiting in my inbox. Whatever my clients or employees needed, I was there to help.

The volume was such that I was rarely able to get through all of the email I had. That meant that a day was filled with six or seven or ten hours of email and phone calls, with no end in sight. It was a conveyor belt that I was never able to step away from.

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I do my best work when traveling.

I actually operate pretty well in transit, whether hot-spotting from a moving vehicle, taking advantage of free wifi on a bus, or outlining a project from the relative peace and quiet of an airplane seat.

But the real magic is in the moments where I do routine tasks like replying to email prior to going on an adventure in some part of the world in which I’d rather be doing something other than routine tasks like replying to email.

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In the early days of my business, I was doing all of my own marketing, sales, customer service, and operations.

That meant that I lived in my email. Each weekday, I would start around 8 AM, crank through as many emails and phone calls as I could, and then start teaching music lessons at 3 PM.

Hiring help was necessary as the business grew, but the volume of email didn’t go down. If anything, it expanded. But I was committed to processing it all, based on what I had learned from David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology, a painstaking process that required making a decision about what to do with each email, phone call, and piece of paper I received. And once everything was processed, my reward would be an empty inbox, an empty voicemail box, or an empty actual box. Everything would be filed, archived, put away, and dealt with.

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