How to Set Yourself Up for Success

By Walter Rogers
President and CEO
Baker Communication

Is it just me, or does it seems that every day it is getting more and more difficult to get any important work done? In business you are always busy, but today social media, emails and texting have changed the dynamics of how we do business. Ostensibly, these new technologies are supposed to help us be more efficient and effective, i.e., more productive. However, one of the un-intended--but powerful--outcomes is that it is much easier for people to get distracted.
These days, a typical executive might receive up to 500 emails and 200 phone calls a week, and be required to attend more than 20 meetings and conference calls each week. Staying focused on the important issues at hand is more difficult than ever. That being the case, when does that individual actually get some work done?

Typically, most people react their way through the day hoping they can get everything done. If they work really hard, when they wrap up at the end of the day they may feel like they‘ve accomplished something. However, staying busy is not the same thing as being truly productive. We must never confuse activity and effort with actually achieving something important. In reality, too many of us never get around to reaching our most important goals because we fail to understand what effective time management and productivity are really all about.

The secret of productivity – and the true goal of effective time management – is to make sure that you are only working on those things that are most relevant to you and to your business, those things that create the most value and lead to the greatest opportunities for growth and success. As we get bombarded with information from many directions simultaneously, it is even more important that we take whatever steps are necessary so as to not lose our focus on these most important goals.

With this in mind, there are four key steps people can take right away to make themselves more productive. I have been studying them for years and have personally seen them make a substantial difference in my own productivity. Here they are:

1. Convene and manage weekly focus meetings.
2. Create a list of the top 3 to 5 items you should focus on each day
3. Get and use a planner, hand-write your three to five most important tasks each day, and mark them off as you accomplish them
4. Empty your email inbox at the end and beginning of each day
    

1. Convene and manage weekly focus meetings
It‘s very common for people, especially managers, to get interrupted non-stop with numerous requests. Typically these requests – which are actually interruptions – all come from the same set of people. The best way to manage these interruptions is to set up a one-hour focus meeting every week to attend to issues that have the greatest amount of impact on your business. It might be things like finance, marketing, sales, customer service, and/or special projects. Ensure that during those weekly meetings you have all of the right participants in attendance so you can make informed decisions quickly and move on. This strategy provides you with several benefits: a) it will help you to hold all of the "noise" and miscellaneous issues that come up during the week and deal with them at once, b) it will guide everyone to map all of this activity back to the key focus areas of your business, and c) it will facilitate whatever decisions are needed to implement small, but important, change week over week. Of course, the best benefit of all is that this will free up large amounts of time for your schedule that you can reallocate to your own personal productivity.

2. Create a list of the top three to five items you should focus on each day
Of course, in order to be truly productive you have to set goals and priorities. We are so accustomed to having our day controlled by email, putting out fires, and other interruptions that we have lost sight of the need to maintain a laser focus on those goals and activities that are critically important to the success of our mission. If we don‘t set these goals in stone and protect them at all costs, we will be at the mercy of dealing with everyone else‘s priorities and our productivity will be destroyed. Your first line of defense against all these distractions is to start every day by identifying the three to five things that you absolutely will get done that day. Doing so will force you to prioritize your work around these most important items. Follow that up by scheduling time specifically to get those three to five things done. If you manage your day against that list, you are going to find that you are getting much more done.

3. Get and use a planner, hand-write your three to five most important tasks each day, and mark them off as you accomplish them
We have all grown dependent on Microsoft Outlook or some other digital device for managing our schedules, and I am not suggesting we stop using those tools for managing appointments and general planning. However, despite all of the techno-options we have to communicate with, there is something magical about actually holding a pen and writing on paper. There is something about writing your goals for the day down on paper that makes them more real and more important.

So, the next recommendation is to go out and buy a physical planner. You are not going to use this to schedule your meetings. You are not going to use this to do anything other than write down the top three to five things you are going to accomplish each day. Physically write them in the planner with a pen, and then as your day goes by you cross out the ones you‘ve accomplished. There is a psychological reward in seeing a completed task with a line drawn through it that you just don‘t get by deleting an item digitally, and it just helps you to stay focused on getting these very important items done when you write them down and check them off every day.

4. Empty your email inbox at the end and beginning of each day
Email is probably the most destructive time management element for all of us. It has been completely abused, and it wastes our time in so many ways. It wastes our time because whenever a new message hits we tend to stop whatever we are doing to check it. It wastes our time because after we read it we often decide to respond to it, which can often take several minutes just to compose and send the reply. If you do this for every email you receive when you receive it, you may see several hours of your productivity go up in smoke as you continually scan up and down your inbox multiple times an hour.

Remind yourself that there is no need to respond to email immediately after it hits your inbox. You have to make sure that whatever comes along during the day does not get in the way of what‘s most important. The best way to make sure you don‘t get sucked into the email trap is to set specific times during the day to check and respond to email. When and how often you do this will be determined by your goals and priorities, but ideally you would want to do this twice a day, first thing in the morning and last thing before you close business for the day.

The best practice is this: at the end of the day respond to all of your emails. Go home and finish your day with as little email in your inbox as possible. Yes, emails are going to come in overnight, but remember step #2 above: the first thing to do in the morning is make your list of the top three to five things you need to accomplish that day. Next, respond to all of your emails so you start the day fresh. Close email out at the end of the day and clear it out first thing in the morning. You will sleep better and perform better each day if you do that because your mind won‘t have to worry about what you are supposed to be doing. You will stay focused on those high priority projects that you need to tackle while email is "humming along" in the background.

There is no rocket science behind any of these steps. They are very basic principles that anybody can implement immediately, starting today! The sooner you begin to practice these four disciplines, the sooner you‘ll benefit from them.
 

Walter Rogers is the President and CEO of Baker Communications. Baker Communications is a sales training and development company specializing in helping client companies increase their sales and management effectiveness. He can be reached at 713-627-7700.

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