Prioritizing your Time

I met with a group of business people today and the general consensus was that the economy continues to struggle. Only one of the people in the room believed the signs of sustainable growth were evident in their market. Those working with municipalities, small businesses, design engineering, and construction all felt there continued to be a general softness in their markets. What was most interesting is that the workload was picking up, but mostly because organizations remain reticent to add staff and people are being stretched even more.

I suspect many of you are experiencing the same sort of situation in your business. Prioritizing your workload becomes even more critical as we find ourselves busier, but not quite confident enough to add staff. There are a number of helpful models that you might want to share with your staff to help them determine how to best prioritize their activity.

The Time Management Matrix which has been attributed to Eisenhower and also was made popular by Stephen Covey in my favorite book, “7 Habits of Highly Effective People”. The Time Management Matrix measures work and activity based on the level of Importance and the level of Urgency. Perhaps obviously, activities that are both Important and Urgent are where we should spent the majority of our time. This includes Crises, Pressing Issues, and Deadline-Driven projects, meetings, and tasks. Next should be Important activities that are not yet urgent. This would include preparation, planning, goal-setting, relationship buildings, process improvement, and long-range activities.

Below the mid-point on the matrix are activities which are Not Important. Urgent but unimportant activities are “foolers” because they appear important due to their urgency, and can sap your time and energy by dragging you into activities which have very little importance. These are the demands for your time when the saying, “Your poor planning is not my emergency” is appropriate. This includes some phone calls, some email and mail, general interruptions and not a few meetings. Finally, you will want to completely avoid and eliminate the unimportant and non-urgent activities from your work day. These include junk mail, some email and phone calls, social media, games, and chit-chat.

Quandrant 1 (Important and Urgent) is where you should spend most of your time. Do these first and do them now. However, if you spend enough time in Quandrant 2 (Important but Not Urgent) you can prevent many important activities from becoming urgent. Plan these activities into your schedule and do not procrastinate. For Quadrant 3 activities (Unimportant but Urgent) – delegate or eliminate. Do not spend time personally on these items. For Quadrant 4 activities, stop doing them immediately and do not even consider them during work hours.

If each person in your organization consistently and accurately evaluated their activities within this matrix, you would find an increase in productivity. Try this for three weeks. Use a chart and assign to a quadrant each activity as it comes to your attention and then practice these suggested responses to them. If you do this well, not only will you become more productive, but within three weeks you should feel more on top of your job than ever before.

Jointly Published on www.apprizesolutions.com, March 11, 2015

Setting Goals - Strive to ASPIRE

Hard to believe that we are already into the 2nd month of 2014.  Literally 1/12 of the year is already past.  I don't know about you, but that is a bit frightening to me.  Perhaps the biggest reason is that I've just barely started nailing down my goals for the year.  Like many of you, I am sure that you've worked through your strategic plan and established your Annual Operating Budget.  You've probably already determined what gaps in your business need filled, and maybe even established big picture objectives.  If you are ahead of me, you've already worked with your direct reports on setting goals for the year.  If you are like me, you've barely set your own, let alone insured that your entire team has done this work.

Goal setting takes time and some solid thinking.  There are many methods for setting goals and many frameworks for how to ensure they are "good" goals.  SMART is the acronym used by many.  Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely.  I have always thought that it seems a bit contradictory to set Annual Goals and consider them "timely", but I do know that I've often worked with people who set goals to accomplish things which require far too many events outside of their control to fall into place in order for them to even get started.  Obviously these are not good goals.

While a quick google search will identify a lot of resources about what makes for a good goal, I'd like to share a process which I believe will help to establish clear and effective goals.

The acronym I use is ASPIRE.  1) Assess your circumstances.  Just like Nehemiah did when he first arrived in Jerusalem (see my comments in Don't "Just Do Something."), we need to fully survey the current state of affairs and insure a thorough understanding.  2) Specify the future outcome.  We need to imagine and identify the future state we want.  The clearer we are about how we want things to be, the better.  3) Plan your action steps.  Establishing an action plan is critical to successfully accomplishing our goals.  These plans should clearly define what will be done, who will do it, and by when.  There must be a single person responsible for seeing the tasks completed and each person involved must understand their tasks.  4) Implement your action plan.  It is not enough to plan, we must execute our plan.  sooner than later, we must act.  We cannot plan for every possible situation, and we will never have all the information we need, but we must still proceed.  Moving forward to implement our plans cannot be delayed.  5) Report the status.  It is not what is expected that gets done, but what is inspected.  Regular reporting on the status is imperative to seeing progress.  This should include establishing an accountability plan for each member of your team.  If the goal is personal, then you should tell someone about the goal and arrange for this person to ask you about it regularly.  Reporting the status, good or bad, is a must if you are to reach your goals.  And 6) Evaluate.  If you have established regular reporting/check-up periods, then you will have time for proper course correction and thorough evaluation of how well you are executing your plans.  In addition, this step provides opportunities for reassessing the current state.  Perhaps before reaching your goal, the external circumstances have changed.  If so, this will require that you revisit your action plans.

Using this method of Assessing the current state, specifying the future outcome, planning your action steps, implementing your plan, reporting your status, and evaluating the results will allow you to get to successfully accomplish your goals.  Once you're there, don't forget to Celebrate.

Best,

jvt