Category: Productivity

Make Today Successful

A friend of mine was recently working on a project and had let the upcoming completion date be a high source of stress. Deadlines can cause stress. Stress can prevent us from achieving the success we desire. My friend eventually worked through their stress and met the deadline for their project. Hidden in her story is a great little lesson.

Do today, what is most important today. If every day you do what is most important, tomorrow will take care of itself. She was able to meet her project deadline because she made a point to get done today the requirements that needed to be done today for the project. Having a longer term plan, but a short term focus can eliminate the stress.

Check your to-do-list. If it looks the same every day, never changing, then do something different. For a week, forget your to-do-list. Instead, define the most important thing (or two or three) to accomplish today. Use this focus to break through the to-do-list stagnation. Build momentum towards a larger goal.

Action is a strong deterrent to stress. I have coached many people that have missed deadlines because they put off taking action. A large project is accomplished through small meaningful actions accumulated over many days. If you can define the action that needs to be done today, and you achieve that action, a large project becomes manageable. If you can take action every day, you will feel the stress fade.

When you think of your biggest goal, what is the action you need to take today?

Don’t Let Perfection Get in the Way

Perfection is defined as reaching the highest attainable standard. In my experience we are sometimes stalled by focusing on perfection. If you have ever delayed taking action because you are afraid that you are not ready or something is not good enough, then you understand how perfection can get in the way of progress. Here are some thoughts on perfection.

1. Don’t confuse perfection and excellence. Excellence requires great results, not perfect results. Release yourself from perfection and create  excellence.

2. Action provides the process to change a vision of perfection into something tangible. Any form of perfection, or even excellence, only resides within our mind until we take action. Ideas need to be turned into results which can only happen with action..

3. Mistakes drive improvement. We improve through practice. We learn from mistakes. We can only get better by making the mistakes that provide insight into advancement.

“Perfection belongs to narrated events, not to those we live.” said Primo Levi. Life is messy. Only in our minds can perfection exist, and I don’t want to let it get in my way.

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!

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.