Proper planning will multiply the effects of your effort. By Carol McLachlan, executive coach and NLP practitioner.
The landscape is rapidly changing - 2009 is going to be tough. Pressure will intensify and demands from your employers and stakeholders will increase. You’ll need to think about your approach to work and how, if possible, you can achieve more with the same, or even less resource.
In the last edition of Insight, we debunked the myth of the multi-tasking accountant and offered ideas like ‘flow’, behavioural modelling and exploiting your personal learning style. These concepts maximise the return we receive on the time we input.
You make progress by leveraging time, not saving it. Saving time is helpful but it’s limited to hours you save. Leverage allows you to multiply the effect of the effort applied - in other words, it allows you to maximise your return on investment.
Set your goals and write them down
How does leveraging work? It’s based on the principle that what you do is more important than how you do it.
It’s imperative that you understand why you are doing what you are doing. What’s it all for? What are your goals? If you aren’t clear, you need to draw up some well formed outcomes. If you don’t, you are in grave danger of being efficient rather than effective.
You may have heard of the Harvard goals study. The project compared a group of graduates: 84% had no explicit goals, 13% set themselves goals and 3% wrote down their goals, together with an action plan. Ten years on, the 13% who set goals earned twice the amount of the group who had no goals. But the 3% with written goals made a whopping ten times more than the goalless group.
Pareto and Parkinson
In formulating what became known as the ‘80/20 rule’, Vilfredo Pareto used mathematical formula to demonstrate that 80% of wealth belonged to 20% of society. We experience its wide application in business every day: on average 80% of sales/profits come from 20% of products/customers. So if we recognise that 80% of effects flow from 20% of causes, then the critical question for your time leverage is which 20% of your activities contribute to 80% of your results?
There’s also Parkinson’s Law, which states that a task expands in relation to the time allotted for its completion. It’s the magic of the imminent deadline. How much do you get done in that last week/day before you go on holiday? You zip through, focusing on the critical, and getting through priorities.
Use these two laws together as the bedrock of your leverage strategy. Identify the few critical tasks that contribute most to your goals and then schedule them with tight, precise start and finish times.
Work on the job
Goal setting, prioritising, scheduling: they all involve upfront planning. Remember: ‘if you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got’.
Using leverage is the art and science of getting much more done with the same, or less, effort. At a simple level, this can free up your time to concentrate on things with the highest priority. At a more sophisticated level, it helps you achieve at a much higher level.
Happy new year and good luck!
See Carol McLachlan's website.
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