ACTION POINTS TO BECOME A LEADER
Make SMART Goals
“A goal without a plan is just a wish”.
Go SMART. Yes, this is a popular goal setting technique worldwide i.e. goals should be:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Relevant
- Time Based
The acronym was coined by George T Doran in November 1981, in an issue of Management Review Magazine.
S.M.A.R.T. goals have a proven history of working. For example: You can define a SMART goal for your daily projects by saying- Finish X Tasks, within Y Timeframe to Z Quality or you can define it at a personal level by saying- I want to lose 3 kg of weight within 30 days in a healthy manner.
Are your goals S.M.A.R.T. enough? What are your goals for the new quarter? List down top 3 goals. Do they qualify the criteria of being S.M.A.R.T. i.e. Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-Based? Go one level deep and check if the tasks/ activities under each of those goals are S.M.A.R.T.
The 80-20 Rule:
The 80/20 Rule states that in any situation, 80% of the outcome/results are based on the impact of 20% input/factors. The Pareto Principle was developed by Vilfredo Pareto in the 19th Century.
The Workplace Pareto:
The Pareto Principle can be applied in our day-to-day tasks as well! 20% of our key tasks take up around 80% of our total execution time.
Using Time Effectively, Not just Efficiently:
Imagine that your boss has asked you to prepare an important presentation for the next regional meeting. You only have a few days to put it together, your workload is already high, and you have many other urgent tasks on your To-Do-List. Because of this, you are anxious, you can’t concentrate, and everything seems to distract you.
Stressing over time?
Time stressors are some of the most common sources of pressure in the workplace, and they happen as a result of having too much to do, in too little time. How do you, then, beat this stress, and deliver tasks that are essential to doing a good job?
Eisenhower’s Technique:
Eisenhower’s Urgent/ Important Principle helps you think about your priorities, and determine which of your activities are important and which are, essentially, distractions.
The quadrant above helps in plotting their tasks as per their level of urgency and importance. Basically, all your tasks can be segregated as:
| Quadrant=> | URGENT | NOT URGENT |
| IMPORTANT | 1 DO | 2 PLAN |
| NOT IMPORTANT | 3 DELEGATE | 4 ELEMINATE |
- Important and Urgent
- Important but Not Urgent
- Not Important but Urgent
- Not Important and Not Urgent
Quadrant 1: Do First:
Quadrant 1 contains tasks that are both urgent and important. These are “do first” tasks because they are critical for your life or career in some way and need to be finished right away. You want to get these tasks done as soon as possible. An example of a quadrant-1 task could be addressing major escalation.
Quadrant 2: Decide When:
The tasks in quadrant 2 are important, but not urgent. This is where you want to invest the majority of your time. Quadrant 2 tasks are in line with your long-term goals. People often associate urgent matters with being important, which is not always true. Because your goals will stay constant, anything that will be beneficial to you in the long term will fall into the second quadrant.
Quadrant 3: Delegate it:
Do you ever feel that you put too much importance on a task that in hindsight was not very important? Or think something has to be done right away, but it’s actually not needed? This common mistake often occurs when someone asks you to do something that does not directly benefit you or get you closer to achieving your goals. For quadrant 3 tasks, it is important to learn and remember how to delegate certain things.
Quadrant 4: Eliminate It:
Honestly, you want to avoid quadrant 4 tasks. These tasks are simply a waste of your time, and they should be eliminated. If you are able to identify and eliminate all of your quadrant 4 tasks, you will free up some much-needed time to invest in your quadrant 2 tasks.
Don’t Firefight!
When you know which activities are important and which are urgent, you can overcome the natural tendency to focus on unimportant urgent activities, so that you can find enough time to do what’s essential for your success. This is the way you can move from “firefighting” to a position where you can grow your business and your career by focusing on the important.
How to Focus on What’s Important, Not just Urgent?
The Struggle:
Do you get to the end of the day and feel that you have met your most pressing deadlines but haven’t accomplished anything that’s fundamentally important? You are not alone! Here are the list of practical tips that will incrementally help you focus on important but don’t require much effort.
1. Schedule Important Tasks:
Research shows that scheduling something makes it dramatically more likely that the task will get done. Unfamiliar but important tasks often have a learning curve. One can’t predict the completion time for them. The “clear the decks” strategy of allowing yourself a full day, even when that seems excessive, can be useful.
2. Isolate the Most Impactful Elements:
If you habitually set goals so lofty you end up putting them off, try this: When you consider a goal, also consider a half-size version. Mentally put your original version and the half-size version side by side, and ask yourself which is the better (more realistic) goal. If your task still feels intimidating, shrink it further until it feels doable.
3. Anticipate and Manage Anxiety:
Many important tasks involve tolerating thoughts about things that can go wrong, which is anxiety-provoking.
You will be better able to pursue goals that involve going outside your psychological comfort zone if you have top-notch skills for managing your thoughts and emotions.
4. Spend Less Time:
Unimportant tasks have a nasty tendency of taking up more time than they should. Having strategies for making quicker decisions can help. It can be better to make a quick decision than a perfect one that takes more time.
5. Ruthlessly Prioritize:
It’s easy to fall into the trap of being “too busy chasing cows to build a fence.” To overcome a pattern of spending all day “chasing cows,” you can eliminate tasks, streamline your workflow, or create templates for recurring tasks. Look for situations in which you can make an investment of time once to set up a system that will save you time in the future.
6. See the Big Picture:
When you are head-down in the grind, it’s hard to have enough mental space to see the big picture. Taking more breaks can help you stop spending a lot of time on unimportant things. Give yourself time to figure out how you are going to translate your insights into specific plans and actions.
You are not alone!
Lastly, if you are struggling with prioritizing the important over the urgent, don’t be too hard on yourself. The struggle is universal. Consider success as taking your own advice at least 50% of the time! This is a reasonable rule of thumb that you might adopt.
RULE OF 3:
The Wise Man’s Wisdom:
“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you have got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other things that are there. You have to pick carefully. I am actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Productivity and Innovation is saying no to 1000 things.” – Steve Jobs
Alas, in real life!
While as individuals we tend to be aware about our goals and what we need to achieve, more often than not, this awareness and sense of direction is cluttered with things which are not so important to us. How many times you begin your day thinking- “I have seven things to work on, where do I start?”
Priorities or Mess?
A lack of clarity in priorities always results in missing deadlines or feeling lost at work. No wonder it’s true that on any given day if you have 3 priorities, they are called as priorities. If you have 20 priorities, then that is called as a mess. Let’s understand the Rule of 3 to focus on what matters the most and align your work life better.
The Rule of 3:
List down your top 3 priorities at work. Discuss these priorities with your manager to check if you are on the right track. Make a conscious effort to spend majority of your time on these priorities and analyze if this exercise allows you to focus on what matters the most and be more productive.
Are You a Doer in Chief?
Being Generous?
“I am a true team player/ team leader. I take one task every day from my team so that they feel I am a part of them. You know that way they will accept me a bit more.” Most of the leaders as well as individual contributors have a misconception about what it means to be leading and working with a team.
Don’t be a “Doer in Chief”
Leading or working with team shouldn’t be consumed with ‘doing it yourself instead of somebody else.’ Rather, it is important to not become the ‘Doer in chief’, but add value where your team members cannot.
Segregating Your Tasks:
| Like to Do | Don’t Like To Do | |
| Need To Do | ||
| Don’t Need To Do |
Segregate your tasks into 4 quadrants as shown in the picture above. Keep the segregation at the back of your mind when you work on your tasks this week.
1. Need to do and Like to do
2. Need to do and Don’t like to do
3. Don’t Need to do but like to do
4. Don’t Need to do and Don’t Like to do
Quadrant 1: Need to Do and Like to Do:
You should be spending about 60% of your time at work on these tasks. The more time you spend on these tasks, the happier you are and the more your productivity prospers.
Quadrant 2: Need to do and Don’t Like to Do (a.k.a.- also known as, “The Necessary Evils”):
These tasks are the necessary evils that come as a package with your job. While you can’t skip these, they should not take more than 25% of your time. More time you spend here, chances are you feel worse about yourself.
Quadrant 3: Don’t Need to do and Like To do (a.k.a. “The Guilty Pleasures”):
There may be some tasks that you continue to do, but if you are really honest with yourself, you know you don’t actually need to do those. Like most guilty pleasures, it’s important to keep them in check- and they shouldn’t take up more than 15% of your time.
Quadrant 4: Don’t Need to Do and Don’t Like to Do (a.k.a. “The Waste of Time”):
This is where you delegate. Ideally, this bucket should be totally empty. If it’s not, it’s time to consider how to lose these tasks as quickly as possible by deleting delegating, or automating them.
The Pickle Jar Theory of Time:
Of Golf Balls, Pebbles and Sand:
Imagine you have a big empty pickle jar. Fill it with golf balls. When you can squeeze no more in, it’s full, right? No quite. The golf balls leave gaps. Drop in some pebbles, give the jar a shake, and let the pebbles drop into those gaps. Next, take some sand. Pour it into the even smaller spaces that are left, until the jar appears to be completely full.
Food for thought:
Now, look at the other way round! Can you first fill the jar fully with sand? Would it leave any room for pebbles and golf balls to fit in? Of course not! The order in which you fill the pickle jar matters a lot.
Pickle Jar of Time:
Well, let’s look at the Pickle Jar theory in the context of time management. The golf balls, pebbles and sand carry a special meaning representing different aspects of your work and time. Guess they stand for?
The Unimportant and The Important:
The Sand (unimportant tasks) represents all the phone calls, emails, social media notifications and other disrupting elements.
The Pebbles (less important tasks) metaphorically stand for the jobs we are confronted with everyday and that fill our diaries.
The Golf balls represent the important tasks in our daily lives. There will be serious consequences if we fail to do the latter tasks.
The Analogy goes without saying that for us to manage time efficiently, we have to fill it with the golf balls first, followed by pebbles and then sand. If we fill it with the sand first, all the time is spent in doing unimportant tasks, leaving no rooms for the important ones. The Pickle Jar serves as a visual metaphor to determine what is useful and what is not useful when it comes to managing our time.
The Pursuit of Productivity:
Stir the Productivity Shake:
Super-productivity people are in every industry. The most productive software developers write nine times more usable code per day than the average developer, according to research by Michael Mankins.
“Productivity is being able to do things that you were never able to do before.”- Franz Kafka
The Secret 7
In his research, Michael Mankins found out that the best blackjack dealer in New York keeps their table playing five times longer and the best sales associate at Nordstrom sells eight times more clothes.
How do they do it? Let’s find out the 7 secret ingredients of being super productive.
1. Set Stretch Goals:
Think about your last week. Did you decide to do some big projects or puttered around doing small tasks? A big project encourages you to pick up your pace and eliminate all distractions. There is some great magic that occurs when people become riveted by the thought of achieving a stretch goal.
2. Show Consistency:
We all know people who are 100% reliable. If they say, “It will be done,” it will get done. The most productive people do not see their productivity ebb and flow over time neither do they procrastinate. They figure out ways to deliver consistent results. They also maintain a rhythm.
3. Acquire Knowledge and Expertise:
Few things kill productivity faster than lack of knowledge or expertise. When you know what you are doing, you don’t have to sacrifice quality for speed. You can get things done both quickly and well. Such people don’t hesitate to ask for help. They intentionally acquire new skills and expand their field of expertise.
4. Get Driven by Results:
Most people accept responsibility for accomplishing goals and work extensively to achieve results. But there are a few people who have a great desire to accomplish results sooner and quicker. Productive people are competitive, believe in setting standards for themselves and beat their own best.
5. Anticipate and Solve Problems:
The most productive people are great problem-solvers. They come up with innovative solutions and accomplish work more efficiently. They also tend to anticipate roadblocks and begin working on solutions in advance to stay ahead of the curve.
6. Take Initiative:
For many people, the hardest part of getting a job done is starting. The most productive people start quickly, and they never wait to be told to begin. Taking initiative is the foremost step towards being productive.
7. Collaborate:
In today’s complex organizations, very little gets done by someone acting alone. Everything is highly interdependent. The most productive people are highly collaborative and work well with others. They don’t have to spend a lot of time soothing ruffled feathers.