Business or Busyness? How do we spend our time?
Do you get the feeling some days that email is running your life? That at the end of the day, you cannot point to accomplishments that make for success – your company’s success or yours? The days when you go home feeling like you achieved your day’s goals were done because you put in a 12-hour day?
One of the repercussions of all the corporate downsizing is that we picked up the work of those whose jobs were terminated. The work didn’t go away … we just took on more. But we didn’t do this efficiently. We just worked longer hours. The 50-hour week became a 60-hour week. And the quality of what we did went south. We’re tired and frustrated.
Shocking though it may seem Busyness Club is where we spend 90% of our time. This based on research by Heike Bruch and Sumantra Ghoshal. They revealed in Harvard Business Review that “fully 90 percent of managers squander their time in all sorts of ineffective activities instead of spending their time in a committed, purposeful and reflective manner.”
You’d be seen as Superman or Superwoman!
Imagine what you could really accomplish if you converted even half of this squandered time into more productive activities.
Bad Habits Reign
Not long ago I became fascinated why people with chronic illness lived such unhealthy lives. People with just three health conditions account for the majority of healthcare expenses. All they need to do is eat right, exercise, stop smoking and take their prescriptions as recommended by the doctor. But they don’t do it. They stay sick.
What if these chronically sick people just set a goal for themselves to enjoy every day of life more fully? What if they changed critical personal behaviors? What if they got support around them to help them through the behavioral change process until new habits formed? My guess is that they’d be happier and the Federal Government would save billions of dollars a year in Medicare payments.
What if we business people did the same thing?
That is, change the behaviors that are adding to our frustration and minimizing our productivity. What if we set out deliberately on a goal of accomplishing more while doing less?
- Change behaviors that hold back our potential for greatness.
- Clear our decks so we can seize new opportunities as they surface.
Clarify Your Values and Vision for a Successful Life
Create Immediate Separation and Balance between Work and Personal World
Your job is your job. Your life is your life. But your job is not your life. What is the personal dream and career dream you have for yourself? Begin at the end and work backwards. Values are the beginning of the end. Establish your priorities based on your values. Get focus on these and let them run what you do and who you do them with.
- What’s important and why?
- What’s the flow chart for how you will achieve the important things in life.
- Put it in writing.
The balance part comes from saying “no” more effectively. Low self esteem leads us to say “yes” when we should say “no” and you can still be a team player in achieving this balance. Do first those things only you can do rather than doing the work of others. The Do-it-Yourself mentality is self-destructive to you and the team. Protect yourself and the team from over-commitment, but do it positively. If you dump your work on others you are being an obstructionist.
Become Aware that Bad Habits Sabotage Us.
Kick them and Replace them with More Productive Habits.
It turns out that changing attitude and behavior is hard to do, even when we desperately want to do it. We’re not yet seeing the huge advantage we can gain. Habits will cause success or failure.
Begin thinking differently about priorities. What are the real values in life that make you feel good. The values and our vision of how to achieve them cause us to behave the way we do. If our focus is on accomplishment, then we will do more stuff so we feel good rather than focusing on the real issues.
Breaking this cycle is not easy.
- Identify the wasted time in your day … what’s not working?
- Replace these activities with new habits that lead more successfully to your values and vision.
- Know what is really important rather than what someone else says is important.
- Set aside your most productive time of the day to do the most important things.
Is answering the never-ending stream of emails that hit your desktop consuming the time you need to do more important tasks? You feel good about email because it gives you a sense of accomplishment, but it is not what will make you or your company successful. Break the habit and replace it with a new one. Instead of answering 50 emails, pick the one that no one else wants to handle … successful people do things everyday that other people don’t want to do.
If the 80/20 rule is at work (and it probably is), then 20% of what you do produces 80% of your value. Stay laser focused on the big things.
Follow the FAST acronym to move a team forward more productively.
Focus – do the important things right
Agree – collaboration is essential
Schedule – commit to deliverables and deadlines
Track – performance, quality, results
Start today.
Pick off the one thing you have been avoiding. Then pick off the one thing you can do better than anyone else. Keep things simple.
End the frustration and begin the celebration when you find the realization to get the motivation without hesitation to build the foundation for your salvation.
Filed Under: Featured • The Mandate for Change
