Review Once or Twice a Year What You’ve Actually Done
Peter Drucker, from Managing the Nonprofit Organization:
All the people I’ve known who have grown review once or twice a year what they have actually done, which part of that work makes sense, and what they should concentrate on.
I’ve been in consulting for almost fifty years now and I’ve learned to sit down with myself for two weeks in August and review my work over the past year. First, where have I made an impact? Where do my clients need me–not just want me but need me? Then, where have I been wasting their time and mine? Where should I concentrate next year so as not only to give my best but also to get the most out of it?
I’m not saying that I always follow my own plan. Very often something comes in over the transom and I forget all my good intentions. But so far as I have become a better and more effective consultant and have gotten more and more personally out of consulting, it’s been because of this practice of focusing on where I can really make a difference.
Only by focusing effort in a thoughtful and organized way can a non-profit executive move to the big step in self-development: how to move beyond simply aligning his or her vision with that of the organization to making that personal vision productive.
Executives who make a really special contribution enable the organization to see itself as having a bigger mission than the one it has inherited. To expand both the organization and the people within it in this way, the top executive must ask the key questions of himself — the questions I ask myself each August. Indeed, each member of the staff must do it, and each volunteer. And the senior people must sit down regularly with each other and consider the questions together.
Drucker on Managing Yourself
If you haven’t read Peter Drucker’s article on managing yourself before, it would be a smart move. It’s a classic and one of the ten best Harvard Business Review articles ever.
Drucker covers five core questions:
- What are my strengths?
- How do I perform?
- What are my values?
- Where do I belong?
- What should I contribute?
Interestingly, John Calvin was one of the key pioneers of “feedback analysis,” which is one of the best ways to discover your strengths.
I Get To vs. I Have To
Do you have to exercise or do you get to exercise? Do you have to work on that long project or do you get to work on that long project? Do you have to rise at 5:30, or do you get to rise at 5:30 so you can have a good start on the day?
There are many things we may not directly choose — for example, I exercise primarily for my health, and not because I intrinsically enjoy it. But given that we will be doing them, we might as well change our mindset and view them positively.
That way, these things aren’t something we have to “get out of the way” in order to get on with “real life.” First of all, that’s a recipe for procrastination. Second and more importantly, though, I don’t have time to fill my life with things that aren’t “real life.”
When your mindset is “I get to” rather than “I have to,” you are more motivated because now you are doing it because you choose to. You will also find that there are many aspects of those activities that you do in fact enjoy, in spite of the difficulty.
You don’t have to run — or do that project — simply for the benefits. Difficult activities aren’t something to just get out of the way so that you can get on with what you really want to do. But you won’t see that if your mindset is “I have to.”
“This Week, What Are the 3 Things I Can Do to Build on My Strengths?”
A brief word from Marcus Buckingham on how to start building on your strengths right now:
Why the Statement “Nobody Says on their Deathbed I Wish I Had Spent More Time at the Office” is Almost Meaningless
The statement is almost meaningless because it only deals with the “what” when the real problem is the “how.” You can have the “what” right (“I want to spend less time working”) but still fail at doing it because good intentions frequently run aground upon the absence of a realistic “how.”
Maybe I’m being too generous here, but it seems to me that most people who spend too much time at the office probably don’t do so because they want to (i.e., their priorities are screwed up), but because they don’t know how to do otherwise (i.e., they don’t know how to execute on their priorities). If they were to suddenly start working less, for example, the result would simply be that the work would build up — thereby distracting them, nagging them, and clogging things up so that their entire life becomes more difficult, not less.
In other words, spending less on time on work is not without consequence. It’s not something you can just do — regardless of intentions. Systems and know-how trump intentions. Just because someone toward the end of their life says “I wish I had spent less time at the office,” it doesn’t mean that they could have. The statement ends up making people feel guilty for wrong priorities when the real problem is often lack of knowledge about how to execute on those priorities.
Further, the statement also fails to acknowledge (“no one says…“) that some people should spend a ton of time working and all people rightly and properly tend to have seasons like this. (Yes, I affirm this in spite of my post yesterday that “you don’t have to be busy” — there are different types of busyness, and doing a smaller number of things sometimes still requires lots of time working if the nature of those things requires it.)
The apostle Paul is a good example of someone who often worked “night and day” (1 Thess 2:9) and labored extremely hard over the course of his life. I don’t think that Paul said at the end of his life “I wish I had spent less time laboring for the gospel.” He might have said “I wish I could have spent less time making tents to fund my ministry,” but his preference with that time would probably have been to devote it to his ministry. In part (this is an important side lesson), the reason that it worked for Paul to be so devoted to the work of his ministry is that he crafted his other responsibilities in a way that made this possible (for example, he remained single).
To be sure, I’m not saying the statement is bad. And neither am I getting into the really interesting new reality that doing work does not always have to equal “being in the office” anymore — which really has the potential to change things up. I don’t want to sound like I’m trashing the intention of this statement.
My point here is simply that we need to be people who do more than simply say things like “no one at the end of their life wishes they had spent more time at the office.” That’s not helpful because it doesn’t acknowledge that it requires skill to actually accomplish the “task” of working less and spending more time with family. We need to be people who give the “how,” not just the “what.”
You Don’t Have to be Busy
Productivity is not first about getting a lot of things done, but about getting the right things done.
If you are getting the right things done, you don’t necessarily have to be doing a large number of things.
In other words, you don’t have to be busy in order to be effective.
So don’t measure your effectiveness by how much you are able to do, but rather by what you do.
And, ironically, if you focus on the quantity of things you do, you will most likely fail to identify and execute on the things that are most important — that is, on the right things.
Beware of Momentum Killers
Momentum is one of the keys to accomplishing your priorities. If you always have to start and stop, not only will things take longer, but you might get thrown out of the mental state that is required for various complex and high-level tasks that you need to accomplish.
The result is that a one hour divergence can actually destroy four hours of productivity (or more).
The most well known (but certainly not only) momentum killer is email. The thing about email is that you never know what you are going to get. You could have had your email clear at 10:00 am, but then at 1:00 some complex emails come in that present a series of tasks that may take an hour to complete. Simply knowing about this can be distracting, but more than that it can be tempting to diverge from your course to accomplish the more important task.
So let’s say you have the afternoon blocked off for a large and complex task. But when you get back from lunch you decide to check email before digging in — and the above scenario happens. A series of complicated emails comes in that require about an hour to complete.
Because you now know about these tasks, your mind starts going down that road a bit. You find this distracting. So you say to yourself, “it sure would be nice to get my email all clear again before heading into this big and complicated project I need to work on.” Then you move ahead on getting those emails and the tasks they contain out of the way.
At the end of this hour, more emails have come in — in part because people are responding back to you from some other smaller emails that you also decided to get out of the way — and you are now on a completely different course.
Now, this is not bad in itself. Email is not the enemy, and there are many instances when it is useful and productive to follow your email for a period of time. The issue here, though, is that you have a different, non-email, high priority task that you need to accomplish. And email derailed you from it.
The real problem, though, is worse: Email didn’t simply cost you the 1-2 hours that you spent away from this high priority task. For by the time you have your email wrapped up again where you want, it’s 3:00 in the afternoon. Half the afternoon is gone. Further, your momentum has been going towards email for the last two hours, making it hard to shift gears into this complex task.
As a result, you are “out of the mindset” needed to generate the focus you need to make progress on the task. So even though you have two hours left before you planned to head home, you cannot use that two hours for the original task you had planned. You’ve lost your momentum. Two hours on email destroyed four hours of productivity on your more important task.
And, it gets even worse. Because, unfortunately, the following day is all booked, you have some other things you need to get done in the middle of the week and, of course, more email will be coming in over that time as well. So it looks like it will be a few days before you can get back to this task. And even then, it is going to be a fight to make it happen.
This is how the loss of momentum makes important things take forever and makes us less satisfied with our days. There is no perfect solution here, but it can make a huge difference to pause and reflect before taking a “small and temporary detour” in a different direction.
By being aware of the potential consequences of losing momentum, we can become more disciplined at putting first things first, and letting other things be crowded out rather than those first things.
The One Skill Necessary for Thriving in a World of Excess Access
In his book The One Thing You Need to Know: … About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success, Marcus Buckingham has a great section on how the most fundamental and critical skill necessary to thriving in this new world of “excess access” is focus. This reality, in turn, has the surprising implication that we should not seek balance, but rather should seek intentional unbalance.
Here’s what he has to say (from pages 25-26):
We live in a world of excess access. We can find whatever we want, whenever we want it, as soon as we want it. This can be wonderfully helpful if we are trying to track down last month’s sales data, an errant bank statement, or a misplaced mother-in-law, but if we are not quite careful, this instant, constant access can overwhelm us.
To thrive in this world will require of us a new skill. Not drive, not sheer intelligence, not creativity, but focus [emphasis added]. The word “focus” has two primary meanings. It can refer either to your ability to sort through many factors and identify those that are most critical — to be able to focus well is to be able to filter well. Or it can refer to your ability to bring sustained pressure to bear once you’ve identified these factors — this is the laser-like quality of focus.
Today you must excel at filtering the world. You must be able to cut through the clutter and zero in on the emotions or facts or events that really matter. You must learn to distinguish between what is merely important and what is imperative. You must learn to place less value on all that you can remember and more on those few things that you must never forget.
This “filtering” component of focus is critical if we are going to avoid drowning in our world of “excess access” and are going to be able to truly benefit from the abundance of access that we have. It allows us to identify what is most important among everything out there.
That is critical all on its own. But its when we come to the second dimension of focus — laser-like precision — that we come to the big implication of these things. Buckingham continues:
But you must also learn the discipline of applying yourself with laser-like precision. As we will see, … [effectiveness] does not come to those who aspire to well-roundedness, breadth, and balance. The reverse is true. Success comes most readily to those who reject balance, who instead pursue strategies that are intentionally imbalanced.
This focus, this willingness to apply disproportionate pressure in a few selected areas of your working life, won’t leave you brittle and narrow. Counterintuitively, this kind of lopsided focus actually increases your capacity and fuels your resilience.
That is exactly right. The world of “excess access” means not only that there is an over-abundance of information and detail to sort through. It also means that there is an over-abundance of choices we have to make in regard to where to spend our time and how to focus our efforts. How do we make this choice?
We make it on the basis of our strengths. Seek to build your life around what you are good at and are energized by, and apply yourself with laser-like precision to those things. The more you can stay on this path, the more effective you will be.
Because none of us are strong in everything, this of necessity means that we must give up pursuing the myth of balance and instead pursue strategic imbalance. We should be “imbalanced” in that the things we choose to do should disproportionately come from areas of our strengths. But this is strategic — not haphazard — because we do this intentionally because we know that we will be most effective when operating in the realm of our strengths rather than our weaknesses.
This leads to two practical questions and applications:
- What things do you do best and find most energizing? Seek to craft your role (and your personal life) in a way that will enable you to do more of those things.
- Which things do you find depleting — even if you are good at them? Seek to carve those out of your role, or if you can’t do that, find ways to tweak how you do them so that they can be done in a way that calls upon your strengths more fully.
The First Step Toward Effectiveness
Peter Drucker:
The first step toward effectiveness is to decide what are the right things to do. Efficiency, which is doing things right, is irrelevant until you work on the right things. Decide your priorities, where to concentrate.
Work within your strengths. The road to effectiveness is not to mimic the behavior of the successful boss you so admire, or to follow the program of a book (even mine). You can only be effective by working with your own set of strengths, a set of strengths that are as distinctive as your fingerprints. Your job is to make effective what you have — not what you don’t have. (From Managing the Nonprofit Organization, 198.)
Making a Difference
The question is not simply, “What must I do to make a difference?” but also “What must I learn to make a difference?”
Managing Time for Young Families
Zach Nielsen has a good post on how to handle the challenges of managing your life when you have a young family. I went to college with Zach, and would recommend his blog in general.
Trustworthiness Has Two Components
Trustworthiness is a function of two things — character and competence. Stephen Cover makes this point well in Principle Centered Leadership:
Most people equate trustworthiness with character alone. Character is vital, but it is also insufficient. For example, would you trust a surgeon to perform a critical operation who is honest in his billing practices, but who has not kept up on advances in his field and is professionally obsolete?
On the other side, some people equate trustworthiness with competence alone. That, too, is insufficient. Would you hire a doctor who was up on the advances in his field but not honest in his billing practices?
And we need to go beyond simply the minimum character requirements. We should seek to be people of character who pursue the good of others. And, we should seek to be incredibly competent in this, because there are few things worse than well-intentioned incompetence.
Pursue both character and competence.
The Essence of Time Management in One Paragraph
Stephen Covey pulls together the essence of time management into four sentences:
The essence of time management is to set priorities and then to organize and execute around them. Setting priorities requires us to think carefully and clearly about values, about ultimate concerns. These then have to be translated into long- and short- term goals and plans translated once more into schedules or time slots. Then, unless something more important — not something more urgent — comes along, we must discipline ourselves to do as we planned. (From Principle Centered Leadership, p 138.)
9 Productivity Practices in one Paragraph
This is an excellent, dense summary of some key productivity practices from Stephen Covey’s Principle Centered Leadership. I count 9 practices here:
Highly effective people carry their agenda with them. Their schedule is their servant, not their master. They organize weekly, adapt daily. However, they are not capricious in changing their plan. They exercise discipline and concentration and do not submit to moods and circumstances. They schedule blocks of prime time for important planning, projects, and creative work. They work on less important and less demanding activities when their fatigue level is higher. They avoid handling paper [and email!] more than once and avoid touching paperwork [and email!] unless they plan on taking action on it.
Get Out There and Try Something!
A good word from Tom Peters and Robert Waterman’s In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies:
Just as you don’t learn anything in science without experimenting, you don’t learn anything in business without trying, failing, and trying again. The trick, and it’s a tough one, is a common cultural understanding of what kind of failure is okay and what kind leads to disaster. But don’t kid yourself. No amount of analysis, especially market research, will lead to true innovation.
Or, as Jim Collins puts it, “try a lot of stuff and keep what works.” That is, branch and prune:
The idea is simple: If you add enough branches to a tree (variation) and intelligently prune the deadwood (selection), then you’ll likely evolve into a collection of healthy branches well positioned to prosper in an ever-changing environment. (Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, 146).
And this doesn’t just apply to your business or organization. It applies to the rest of your life as well. Try stuff. Make things happen. Build on what works.
Too Much? No, Too Little…
Now this is really interesting. I haven’t put things together in this way before, but I think it’s right:
“Your feelings of being overwhelmed don’t spring from having too much on your plate, but from having too little [emphasis added], too little of what strengthens you. The specific activities that strengthen you have been drowned out by everything else.
Wow. The problem is not too much to do — there is too much to do, but that’s not the problem. The problem is doing too little that aligns with your strengths — that is, not devoting the majority of your attention to the things that make you feel strong. We let the “too much” crowd out the things where we can really make a contribution, with the result that we do too little of what we are best at.
So, what is the solution?
Prioritize your to-dos based on what makes you feel strong. Which ones do you love? Which ones are you actually looking forward to? Make a plan to do those first, and to find a small way to celebrate them when you’ve done them. Cradling these activities will give you strength and resilience to get through everything else.
This is from Marcus Buckingham’s new book Find Your Strongest Life: What the Happiest and Most Successful Women Do Differently.
(As an aside here: Yes, you read that sub-title correctly: it’s for women. I love Buckingham’s stuff, but almost skipped this one for that reason. I ended up buying it for my wife and have now been reading it tonight instead of her, while she reads one of my other Marcus Buckingham books.
(Marcus Buckingham is “the strengths guy” who worked for the Gallup organization and wrote the paradigm-shaping books First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently [on management] and Now, Discover Your Strengths [on developing your strengths]. I find everything that he writes to be incredibly insightful.
(His latest book here was a surprise to me [and I'm not a fan of the pink cover -- but it's not for me, anyway], but it’s an extension of his teaching on strengths to the problems women face. So I decided that it would be a great gift to serve my wife. And, it looks like there are a lot of good things in it that men can learn from, too.)
Why Being Organized Matters
Being organized matters because it reduces the friction in getting things done.
In other words:
Most people act when it’s easy to do so. The better organized you are, the easier it is to act and the greater the tendency for you to do those things that should be done when they should be done, whether you like to or not. (The Personal Efficiency Program: How to Stop Feeling Overwhelmed and Win Back Control of Your Work, p 4.)
What Needs to Be Done?
From Drucker’s The Effective Executive:
The first practice [of an effective executive] is to ask what needs to be done. Note that the question is not “What do I want to do?” Asking what has to be done, and taking the question seriously, is crucial for managerial success. Failure to ask this question will render even the ablest executive ineffectual.
The Secret of those Who Do So Many Things
From The Effective Executive:
This is the “secret” of those people who “do so many things” and apparently so many difficult things. They do only one at a time. As a result, they need much less time in the end than the rest of us.
That last sentence is critical: “as a result, they need much less time in the end than the rest of us.”
Doing One Thing at a Time is the Way to Get More Done, Not Less
From Drucker’s The Effective Executive:
Concentration is necessary precisely because the executive faces so many tasks clamoring to be done. For doing one thing at a time means doing it fast. The more one can concentrate time, effort, and resources, the greater the number and diversity of tasks one can actually perform.
On Concentration and Effectiveness
From The Effective Executive:
If there is any one “secret” of effectiveness, it is concentration. Effective executives do first things first and they do one thing at a time.
The need to concentrate is grounded both in the nature of the executive job and in the nature of man. …
The more an executive focuses on upward contribution, the more will he require fairly big continuous chunks of time. The more he switches from being busy to achieving results, the more will he shift to sustained efforts — efforts which require a fairly big quantum of time to bear fruit. Yet to get even that half-day or those two weeks of really productive time requires self-discipline and an iron determination to say “No.” …
But concentration is dictated by the fact that most of us find it hard enough to do well even one thing at a time, let alone two. Mankind is indeed capable of doing an amazingly wide diversity of things; humanity is a “multipurpose tool.” But the way to apply productively mankind’s great range is to bring to bear a large number of individual capabilities on one task. …
Concentration is necessary precisely because the executive faces so many tasks clamoring to be done. For doing one thing at a time means doing it fast. The more one can concentrate time, effort, and resources, the greater the number and diversity of tasks one can actually perform.
How Much Sleep Do You Get Each Night?
Great discussion on exercise habits in the previous post.
It sounds like most people exercise in the morning and that a lot of people are early risers. Which leads to another question that would be great to hear people’s thoughts on: How much sleep do you tend to get each night? In your opinion, what is the best time to get up in the morning and the best time to go to bed at night?
What Time of Day Do You Exercise (if you do)?
I’d be interested in hearing from you on when you exercise. What time of day works best for you?
For years I would jog and lift weights right when getting home from work. For the last year or so I’ve been getting up early to exercise.
Both have their drawbacks — when I exercise in the morning, it feels like it delays the start of my day; when I exercise after work, it feels like it delays the start of my evening with my family.
What works best for you?
The Common Denominator of Success
From Stephen Covey and Rebecca Merrill’s book First Things First:
The common denominator of success is not hard work, astute human relations, or luck, although all are important. It is putting first things first.
Great news. Except that that among all the things they listed (and all the other things they could have listed), that’s the hardest to do.
The Problem with “Leave the Office Early” Day
Tuesday was “leave the office early” day. Cali and Jody at the ROWE blog have a great post on the problems with that idea.
And here’s what’s great: the problem is not with the idea of leaving work early.
About Matt Perman
Follower of Christ. Husband of one, father of three. Former director of strategy at Desiring God. This blog exists to help equip Christians in good works, because that's what productivity is really about.
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