1. Does it fit into the big picture?
This is the 80/20 rule. Should eliminate 80% of stuff. Of course you have to know what the big picture is. I think many people are afraid to eliminate stuff because it MIGHT turn into something useful.
2. Is it important or just urgent?
Some stuff is both! But in general, the more you do important stuff – the less stuff there is that is urgent but not important.
3. Am I the only person who can do this?
If the answer is YES in your business then you’re not doing well in building a company – just a job.
4. Do I have to be there in person?
I’m ambivalent about this one. Technology is good for transmittal of information without you being there in person. But lousy for the nuance of non-information, emotions, possibility, serendipity etc. Since you don’t know what you don’t know it’s hard to tell in advance.
[Digression about the phrase "You don't know what you don't know"
- end of digression]
5. Will it cost me if I don’t go?
And what will it cost me (in opportunity cost) if I DO go? As the original article (see below) says the COST might be “who will I piss off if I don’t go?â€
Questions from http://cashbulge.com/2007/08/14/a-few-tips-on-how-to-shrink-and-prioritze-your-to-do-list/
[The Comments are mine]
One of the services that makes this blog worth every dollar you pay for it, is the time I take to scour the web and find the gems for you. Two posts in blogs I love come together today under the heading :Why didn’t I think of that?
Seth Godin says make sure your system works before you make it bigger. DUH! My refinements are: Make sure you can sell before you spend more on marketing and advertising. And make sure you can sell at a profit (including the cost of sales) before you do more of it. No sense paying people to take your stuff.
Guy Kawasaki posts an interview with Jeffrey Pfeffer author of “What Were They Thinking?: Unconventional Wisdom About Management.” 16 questions and answers – You could spend 6 months on each one and your company would see vast improvement. Here are a couple of my favorites:
Question: What can companies do to get smarter?
Answer: Companies learn just like people learn—by trying new things and seeing what happens. That requires, first, a tolerance for failure, since by definition, learning means doing things you aren’t very good at.
Second, it requires structured self-reflection—after-action or after-event reviews so that instead of having one year of experience repeated 20 times, people and companies actually accumulate learning over time.Question: What is the proper role for a CEO?
Answer: To develop others and their talents and to create an environment in which people can do their best and want to. It is not to make all the decisions or, like some kind of “sun king,†absorb all the light and the attention.In fact, sometimes, as the Grammy-award winning Orpheus Chamber orchestra shows, the best leadership is less leadership. No seed can grow if it is dug up and examined every week, and for people to innovate and get things done, sometimes they need some time and space and resources.
Takeaways:
[tags]small business, management, CEO Skills, entrepreneur [/tags]
200,000 deliveries a day. 5,000 employees (many barely literate) and an enviable error rate without depending on electronic technology. And such dedication that when Royalty visits, Prince Charles (yes, THAT Prince Charles) adjusts his schedule to fit theirs, because they won’t deviate.
What’s your error rate?
Your dedication level?
Read about the Dabbawala and see if you can think of reasons for their success.
My Reasons:
Post your reasons in the comments.
Takeaway:
[tags] small business, entrepreneur, error rate, management, productivity, Dabbawala [/tags]
“When you’re up to your eyeballs in alligators, it’s hard to remember that you set out to drain the swamp.”
Many clients come to me in that situation. And they feel paralyzed with so many emergencies they don’t see how to get ahead. I’ll make this short for those of you who have to get back to your latest brush fire.
A useful distinction: Urgent vs Important.
All of the things that demand your time are urgent. Only some are also important. But some important things are not urgent. (doing your will, training your managers to manage better, hiring that new assistant). So those always get put off when there are too many “urgentcies”. The irony is that most of the important things will actually prevent or reduce the urgent interruptions if you’d only have time to do them.
Takeaway:
If you do that each day, you’ll get 5 things done a week. Many of them will be the important things that are not urgent, and they’ll reduce emergencies in the future.
Bonus Takeaway:
An effective schedule is composed solely of Routine, Rocks and Reserves. You should be able to look at your calendar and see them.
Routine.
This is missing from most entrepreneur’s schedule. It’s the routine meetings and regular times you review reports. Of course you don’t have time for this. There’s too much happening in your day. And all those damn interruptions. What you don’t realize is that if you have the right routine it minimizes the interruptions and the surprises. But you may have to give up the adrenaline addiction, so it won’t feel the same.
What is the right routine? More than I can go into here but check out Mastering The Rockefeller Habits by Verne Harnish. It involves doing certain things daily, others weekly, monthly and quarterly. You can do them by phone when traveling so there’s no excuse. And they don’t take a lot of time but they must be done consistently.
Rocks.
These are the important things that are never urgent. The name comes from a story told in First Things First by Stephen Covey. (Buy it used at Amazon for a penny.)
The gist is that if you want to fill a bucket with some rocks, some gravel, some sand and some water, you need to put the rocks in first and let the other stuff flow around them. Your rocks are the projects you want to get done but can’t find time for. Pick one. Two at the most. You need to put rock time on your calendar just like you would any important meeting. Work on them till they’re finished then move to the next rocks. In a year, you’ll get much more done than if you try to work on thirty at once a little at a time.
For some people, rocks are the production time they need – this is true for lawyers, graphic artists, phone sales people and the like. The key to these rocks is to schedule time that’s uninterrupted and keep it that way. Don’t check email, don’t answer the phone, make sure the others in your office know not to knock unless there’s blood or fire.
Reserves
Once your schedule has the routines and rocks in it, there should be space. That means you have to be selective about scheduling your rocks. Don’t fill up the schedule. Leave that space alone. The holes in your calendar are your reserve. They will fill up. Some problems and emergencies will arise (fewer than when you didn’t have routine, but some will.) More importantly, some opportunities will show up and you’ll now have time to take advantage of them. That’s what reserves are for.
Takeaways:
Last week I wrote about not buying people’s time. If you’re not buying time, you have to know what you are buying. This is harder than buying time, so we buy time as a cop out. It’s hard for two reasons.
One is we often don’t know how to explain what we want but “we know it when we see it”. Assuming for a minute that our knowing it when we see it is consistent (and it often isn’t) it still helps to explain what we want, so the other person knows.
The other reason is we don’t know how much is enough or when the job is done. Most knowledge work is like that. If I’m painting a room it’s obvious to me or anyone watching if I’m done, and before that, how much I have left to go. If I’m doing a marketing report, or researching competitors on the web, how do you know when you’ve done enough? It could go on forever. Generally what happens is you do it till something else becomes more urgent. Sort of like on Thanksgiving when you eat till the game is on. Then you doze in front of the game till you’re hungry. Then you eat till it’s time to take a nap etc.
So try this. Imagine your employees worked the night shift. And you came in every morning and never saw them.
How would you know what they’d done?
How would you know who did a good job?
How would you know how much work was left to do?
Try that for each person’s job. Write down your thoughts. Discuss with them.
You won’t get all your answers doing this exercise, but it will help.
Takeaways. Describing expected results and managing that way does the following:
Many moons ago a buddy and I got a sub-contracting gig putting roofing shingles on a building. It was our first and last roofing job – we were terrible. And not because we only had old fashioned hammers instead of the (then) new-fangled air guns. No, it was because we didn’t know what we were doing - didn’t line things up right, didn’t use the right kind of nails etc. An air gun would have only helped us makes mistakes quicker.
Technology is like that. Besides knowing how to use it, you have to know what to use it for. For most businesses that means you’re going to have to change the way you work in order to get the benefit of new technology. And you’re going to have to change your mind set. Buying the newest technology won’t do that for you. Ten years ago, many small companies didn’t adopt new technology for that reason. Today that would be a death sentence.
Put Data in Only Once -Use it Often
Here’s a small example in the field of IT – information technology. One of the principles of ideal IT design is that you only have to capture data one time in one place, then you can use it everywhere. This means its much cheaper and easier to use the information you have than it would be if it were only captured on paper.
For example, I know a guy who owns several title companies that do real estate closings. Each time they get a new file, they capture a lot of info including the name of the person who sent the file. In the real olden days, those files were paper. so even though each file had a source, there was no easy way to aggregate that information and learn who had been sending over the most files every month. Or who was sending over the most profitable files, or if there was a pattern of whose files tended to have more problems.
That was the olden days. Putting that information on a computer helped a bit. But unless you changed how people put that information in, you still couldn’t get it out right. Some would put it in a spreadsheet, some in a word processing document. different people might get business from the same source but spell the name differently or one would use a first name and last name and one would use the last name and the company name.
But when the operating procedures (ie the ways people work) are adapted to use the tools, then data goes in the system correctly. Once that data is in the system it’s relatively easy to get it out for all kinds of new uses. This makes it cheap and easy to do things like:
However, the owner of the companies that I was telling you about is from the old school. He wasn’t raised on technology, and while he does use it, he’s never been shown how to get the best use out of it. So he didn’t think of all the things he should be able to do with it.
But if you want to survive you’d better get with the program – your competition is, and your customers demand it. Back when I did my one and only roofing job, many knowledgeable roofers still used a hammer, not an air gun. None do today.
Takeaways:
Just thought I’d share a nice piece of software I’ve been using called The Journal ($40 with a 45 day trial and as always I’ve got no financial stake in the company.) It’s designed to pop up a new page every day where you jot down your thoughts. Sort of like a journal. DUH!
I’m using it in a feeble attempt to stay on top of all my projects using David Allen’s Getting Things Done method. The Journal lets me set up categories (the tabs you see in the picture) and they can have entries and sub-entries. Did you know it’s not uncommon to have 60 projects a person is dealing with? Makes me feel better.
In the default useage, you have a new entry for each date of your ramblings. But I use that as a kind of scratch pad / TODO list. Then I have a tab for each project. In the project notes, you can do a lot of formatting (outlines, tables etc – in some cases easier than WORD) and you can assign topics to any text or picture you put in the journal. Then you can search by word or by topic. That’s the power.
So scattered about among many projects you have many tasks. Some are assigned to your assistant. You can put them all in a topic and then search by that topic. All the tasks assigned to him from every project show up in the search. All without making a separate list. Followers of the Getting Things Done method (GTD as the cult members call it) will realize you can make a topic for calls, at home, at computer, waiting on, shopping and all the other ways you’d want to catagorize tasks. COOL
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