Question three: “What are my key result areas?” What are the specific results that you have to get in order to do your job in an excellent fashion?
Of all those key result areas, which are most important?
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Question four: “What can I, and only I do that if done well will make a real difference?” What is the one thing, hour by hour, that only you can do, that if you do it well will make a significant contribution to your business? This is something that no one else can do for you. If you don’t do it, it won’t be done. Doing this task, doing it well and doing it promptly, can have a major impact on your career.
Question five: “What is the most valuable use of my time, right now?” This is the key question in time management. Every time planning and management skill is oriented around helping you to determine the correct answer to this question at every moment of the day. What is the most valuable use of your time right now?
The Law of Forced Efficiency
This law says that, when you are under tremendous pressure to get results, you become more and more efficient at setting priorities and getting things done.
Here is an exercise for you. Imagine that your boss came to you with two first class tickets plus five days, all expenses paid, in a beautiful vacation resort. It is Monday morning at 9 o’clock. Your boss won these tickets at a raffle the night before but he cannot use them. He is willing to give them to you if you can get all your work for the week done by 5 o’clock this afternoon.
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If you received such an offer, and it was only valid if you could get your week’s work done by the end of the day, how would that change your method of working? What would be the first thing that you would want to be sure to complete before you left? What would be the second task or activity?
How much of your time would you spend drinking coffee and chatting with your coworkers under such a constraint? How would you do your work differently if you only had one day to complete five days worth of work?
We encourage our seminar participants to set priorities by asking, “If I had to leave town for a month, and I could only finish one task before I left town, what one task would be the most important for me to get done?”
Put the pressure of priorities on yourself. Ask yourself these questions on a regular basis. And whatever your answer set those key tasks as your highest priorities. Go to work on them immediately, and concentrate single-mindedly on those tasks until they are complete.
Aim for Maximum Payoff
Your time is your life. When you are working on your highest priority tasks, you are using your life at the very highest level. Anything you do other than your top priorities are a relative waste of time. They contribute less to your life than other things that you could do.
The biggest pay off of all is that when you are working single-mindedly on your highest priority task, you experience an unending flow of energy, 131
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enthusiasm and self-esteem. You feel more powerful and confident. You feel terrific about yourself and your life.
If you work on low priority tasks, no matter how many hours you put in, you get no sense of satisfaction or pleasure. You merely feel tired and stressed out at the end of the day. You feel harried and overwhelmed. You feel frustrated and unhappy.
Take Time to Think and Then Take Action
Take time before you begin work to think through and establish your priorities, using the various ideas and techniques explained in this chapter.
Select the most valuable use of your time and get started on that one task.
Discipline yourself to stay with that task until it is complete. When you repeatedly concentrate on your top priorities, you will soon develop the habit of high performance. With this habit, you will get two or three times as much done every day as anyone else who works around you. And you will feel terrific about yourself.
“Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out, without ceasing.” (Robert Collier)
Action Exercises:
1. Resolve today that you are going to become excellent at thinking through and working exclusively on your top priority tasks; never allow exceptions until this becomes a habit.
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2. Make a list of activities each day before you begin, and set careful priorities on your list. Divide the items by applying the ABCDE
method to each one before starting. Always work on you’re A-1 task.
3. Apply the 80/20 Rule to every part of your business and personal life; identify the top 20% of activities, customers, products, services and tasks that account for 80% of the value, and focus on them before anything else.
4. Identify your key constraints to business and personal success; what sets the speed at which you achieve a specific goal, and what could you do to remove the limiting factor, either in yourself or in the situation?
5. Think about the potential consequences of doing or not doing a particular task; separate the urgent from the important and spend more time doing those things that can have a major effect on your future.
6. Determine your personal areas of excellence, those jobs that you do easily and well, faster and better than others. These activities are where you can make the greatest contribution to your company.
7. Every hour of every day, ask yourself, “What is the most valuable use of my time, right now?” Whatever the answer, be sure that you are working on that task, the one that can make a greater difference than anything else.
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Chapter Five
Getting Things Done
“Man is not the creature of circumstances; circumstances are the creatures of men. We are free agents, and man is more powerful than matter.”
(Benjamin Disraeli)
Good work habits go hand in hand with success in every area of endeavor.
There is nothing that will bring you to the attention of your superiors faster than developing a reputation for being a good, dependable worker. How you work determines the quality and quantity of your rewards. How you work determines how much you earn, how effective you are, how much you are respected in your organization and how much real satisfaction you get out of your job.
Unfortunately, most people are poor workers. They are unorganized, unfocused and easily distracted. They work at about 50% of capacity. Sadly enough, they don’t even seem to know how to work any differently. Even if they wanted to, like speaking a foreign language, they wouldn’t know how to do it.
Much of the blame for poor work habits goes back to the school system, to the attitudes of teachers toward academic excellence, and the attitudes of parents toward homework. If people go through 10 or 12 or even 15 years of schooling and never have to learn how to settle down and produce good 134
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quality work, it’s not surprising they will have a hard time producing high quality work when they enter the workforce.
The Habits of Highly Productive People
In this chapter, you will learn how to develop the habits of highly productive people. To begin with, the foundations of good work habits can be summarized in two words: Focus and Concentration.
Focus requires clarity concerning the desired results and the relative priority of each step that you need to take to achieve those results. When you think of focus, think of a photographer adjusting his or her lens to keep the key subject of the photo sharp in the center of the picture.
In order to be truly effective at work, you must be continually adjusting your lens to be sure that what you are working on is the most important thing you could be doing at the moment to achieve your most important goal. The worst waste of time is doing something very well that need not be done at all.
Concentrate Your Energies
Concentration requires the ability to stay with a task until it is 100%
complete. Concentration means that you work in a straight line from where you are to where you want to go without diversion or distraction.
Concentration requires that you stay on task, without getting sidetracked into doing things of lesser importance.
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There is a story of a traveler in ancient Greece who met an old man on the road and asked him how he could get to Mount Olympus. The old man, who turned out to be Socrates, replied by saying, “If you really want to get to Mount Olympus, just make sure that every step you take is headed in that direction.”