One of the biggest challenges I come across when working with leaders to develop their impact is their ability to break free from the demands of the day-to-day job, the constant flow of emails and phone calls demanding their attention. It’s all too easy to be pulled in several directions at once, to find yourself working on other people’s priorities, to create increasingly long to-do lists and to find yourself not having enough hours in the day, and days in the week, to get everything done. Sound familiar? The more you allow yourself to be pulled into this, the less time you have to focus on those activities and projects that are going to have the biggest impact on your career and your company’s future.
In developing strategy with leadership teams, I come across a similar problem; we create lists of great strategic projects with relative ease. However, given that very few businesses today have spare resources lying around, I find they lack the ability to do everything – or at least lack the resource to do this and the day job. We therefore have to decide what they have the capacity to deliver.
One of the skills of great leaders, and great leadership teams, is working out what you are NOT going to do, to create the space to do the important things.
I read a great article this week in Inc: “Warren Buffett Says This 1 Simple Habit Separates Successful People from Everybody Else”. His approach is relatively simple (in theory, but I’m sure requires considerable personal discipline in practice):-
- Write down a list of your top 25 career goals. (for ‘career goals’ read strategic projects, things on your to-do list etc.)
- Circle the five most important goals (projects/things to-do)
- Say ‘NO’ to the other 20 goals/projects/things to do and focus your efforts on completing your 5 important goals.
Sounds simple, but is it practical? In developing strategy, will those 5 ‘important’ initiatives get you to your strategic goal? If so, great, but if not is worth thinking about what the smallest list of projects would be that would deliver the plan. For individual tasks, can some tasks simply be eliminated? What would happen if you just ignored them? Jim Collins, who wrote “Good to Great”, suggested we write ‘stop doing’ lists rather than focus on ‘to-do’ lists. For the other ‘stuff’ that can’t or won’t go away what can you delegate, what can be put off until tomorrow?
With so many demands on your time, and your teams, isn’t it worth thinking about what you can say ‘No’ to?
