Mark S. Brown – Page 11

It’s Urgent!

Moving with urgency means being action oriented, fast-paced, and swift. A sense of urgency can positively impact results for individuals and teams. However, the pace is relative based on your own experience and efforts.

As a leader I know an urgent pace for some is more accelerated than for others. It makes creating a sense of urgency a challenge. This week I share some of my thoughts on urgency and urge you to think about how they may affect your results.

1. Reflection. When I reach a milestone, I usually take time to reflect on lessons learned. One of the questions, I ask myself is “how could it have been achieved faster?” I try to determine where the pace was dictated by resources, people, knowledge, or outside influences. This understanding can help future activities, and strengthen the lessons learned.

2. Observation. Since pace is relative, it is important to observe the change of pace. Ideally I would like to see all parts of an activity or project accelerate, but if some area is lacking, it needs closer examination.

3. Results. Urgency should bring results quicker. But you risk increasing errors, or skipping important steps. I have learned that increasing urgency with a team also requires increasing the diligence in monitoring and evaluation of results. Urgency can drive extraordinary results, but only if care is given excellence.

4. Importance. Orrin Woodward said, “When the urgent crowds out the important, people urgently accomplish nothing of value.” Not everything should be urgent. Urgency loses its power if everything needs to be done first. Make only the most important thing urgent.

Urgency can help us become better, but we can also become better at being urgent. Have a great week!

Yes, But Are You Increasing Your Knowledge?

Before the world became so electronically connected I remember being bored occasionally. Usually it occurred when I was stuck someplace with nothing to do like a doctor’s office waiting room. Today, we are never bored. We engage with our phone or tablet, and we become busy.

Our lives have become filled with information and data. We are driven by the ability to access anything, and chat with anyone, at any time. But there is a difference between information and knowledge, isn’t there?

Information becomes knowledge through the process of study, the gaining of understanding, use and practice, and maybe even memorization. In today’s deluge of data, most of what we process never becomes fully understood. In an instant our focus shifts to the next piece of information, data, text, video, or email.

I have discovered that a very small shift in my process yields great returns. I strive to live in an environment where I can specialize on certain things, and relegate all other streams of information as cursory. Imagine becoming an expert on your selected topics, and yet still being aware of the flow of information on everything else that passes through your day.

The change is not in limiting what you see, hear, or read. It is in predetermining what needs more of your time. It is seeing the big picture, but magnifying a piece that is more important to you.

I warned you that this is a very small shift. It just requires taking a moment and thinking about what is important to you today. Then live looking through that lens, and prevent distractions from taking more of your time than necessary.

Would your life be better if you were more of an expert at certain skills? Can you shift your daily thinking to add focus to that area?

Choosing to Say No

I say “yes” too often. I enjoy helping other people whenever I can, so that is not what bothers me. However when I say “yes” to myself and I am already stretched for time or resources, I know I am overcommitting. That is frustrating. Do you also find yourself saying “yes” just because you want to accomplish more?

The ability to say “no” is very powerful. When I say “no”, it is not to limit what I want to accomplish. The result I seek is to give myself the ability to stay focused on more important tasks.

This week, I sat down to review my open projects. I captured what needed to be done for each, and where I lacked the progress that I desired. Juggling all the needed attention, because of time, priorities, or conflicting deadlines (especially self-inflicted deadlines) is difficult.

With the analysis in front of me, it became clear that all my projects suffered a little bit because I was splitting my focus across too many projects. So I decided to remove some from my regular schedule. The result is that my focus is more narrow, and I can accomplish more on the remaining projects. This has had a major impact to my day. It has given me more energy to work on specific tasks.

You may be thinking that this was not a big breakthrough, and we all work too many projects. I would challenge you to take a blank piece of paper and list of all your current projects and activities. Then write things you know you need to be doing, but never seem to have the time, energy or resources. If you are like most people, you will see that most of your projects do not get enough of your time.

So what should change? What project needs more of your focus to accomplish your goal? What project must you eliminate to make this happen? Caution! These changes could result in more being accomplished, reduced stress, and increased happiness.

Where Is Your Focus?

I have learned much from a friend of mine, Dan, about attention and focus. He has said that attention works like a muscle. If you exercise it, it grows. There seems no doubt that our ability to focus greatly enhances our results, but it is difficult to quantify and measure.

I like to be aware of my current focus. One model that helps with this is to consider three areas of focus, inner, outer, and other.

1. Inner focus – This is the focus on our self. We are seeing the world in terms of impact to our life. We are using intuition and our embedded values, and making decisions for our self.

2. Outer focus – Our world is made up of layers upon layers of complex systems. This is the construct from which everything operates, and includes systems such as corporate, biological, financial, legal, and educational. When our focus is here, we are trying to work within the constraints of the construct. This includes strategizing.

3. Other focus – This is the focus on other people and our relationships. We are utilizing our connections to other people. We use this focus to enhance our relationships, and see the world from some one else’s view.

At any given instant, our focus can only be in one of these three areas. One measure of success is how intentional we can be in focus. Being able to exclude other thoughts and remain on task. But another measure of success is how flexible we are in switching between these three areas, and understanding the impact of one upon the other.

It is an interesting concept, and it makes me ask, “Where is my focus at the moment? Where should it be?”