The dawning of a fresh new year is always an opportunity to recalibrate your thinking and re-energise. Whether you are updating your bucket list, resetting business goals, trying to get fitter or eat healthier, the opportunity to do something to change things is certainly in the air.
Over the past 12 or so months I have met many business owners both within and outside the optics profession. Of the people I have spoken with so far in 2022, most if not all see the new year as an opportunity to put the last two years behind them and look to create a change in their organisations. Within optics, this is manifesting in actions such as moving to a private model, investing in new equipment, introducing audiology, or refitting practices.
Outside of optics a healthcare centre is looking to invest in a cryo-chamber to help sports people to recover faster from injury, a coaching company adding new methods to their portfolio and a lighting company investing in a new electric fleet of vans for their workforce.
It never ceases to amaze me how people who have a desire to own a thriving business never consider the job done. They understand that, with everything around them moving and developing, standing still equates to going backwards. One leader, whom I speak with regularly and never seems happy to rest on his laurels, tells me how important it is to maintain a positive mindset and not let disappointment get you down. Well versed clichés such as: ‘You don’t fail when you fall down, you only fail when you don’t get up,’ spring to mind.
So, as we hopefully start to move forward after the past two years of disruption, what are you looking to change. Where can you make a difference, either to you or to those around you? What good habits are you going to adopt and what bad ones are you going to consign to the past? Are you simply going to hit the replay button on 2021 or are you going to take a leap of faith and try something different?
One way to help make the decision is not to try to achieve too much in one hit. One of my favourite quotes is from Stephen Covey: ‘The key is not to prioritise what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities’. Now I would be the first to admit that this is easier said than done. The temptation for me has always been to get the little things done to create the time and space to focus properly on the main event. The problem with this is that if you are overstretched, it is the most important tasks and objectives that fall behind schedule.
This plagued most of my working life until I received some advice at a workshop on time management. The suggestion was to ‘diarise everything’. Not just the stuff you have to do, not just meetings and appointments, but everything. The preparation, the follow up, the down time, travel time and, of course, breaks. I tried this and I have to say it has made a profound difference to my own management of priorities.
By putting everything in the diary, one quickly realises that we too often set unrealistic goals. In fact, worse than that we overstretch ourselves so much that either things do not get achieved or the quality of the work suffers.
I recently read a story that epitomises this concept, which involves Ivy Lee, the father of modern public relations. Ivy received a call from Charles M Schwab, who was the CEO of Bethlehem Steel. Schwab was concerned by the low productivity of his managers and wanted to find out if they could be more efficient.
The story goes that Lee offered to give Schwab ‘the secret of time management’. All Schwab needed to do was implement the system for one week and then send him a cheque for what he thought the advice was worth. Schwab followed through and sure enough, the impact was almost immediate, and he sent a cheque for $25,000 (as this was back in the 1920s that is about $250,000 in today’s money).
So, what was the advice? At the end of each day, each manager was asked to list their top six priorities for the following day and rank them in order of importance. Next morning, when they came into work, they had to work on priority number one and moreover they were not allowed to move on until that task was complete. Then they would move on to priority number two, then three and so on.
Evidently this method of time management can lead to reduced stress and prevent you from becoming overstretched. If you want to try this for yourself, go and grab a pen and a piece of paper now and write down your top six priorities for tomorrow and set about them one by one.
- Let me know if this works for you or if you have any comments at mentoris58@gmail.com.