Be careful how you act; these are difficult days.
Don't be fools; be wise: make the most of every opportunity you have for doing good.
Don't be fools; be wise: make the most of every opportunity you have for doing good.
(Ephesians 5:15)
There is a right time for everything.
(Ecclesiastes 3:1)
My, How Time Flies!
Time flies whether you are having fun or not, so you might as well have fun while it is passing! Time cannot be spent, saved, stored, invested or recovered like money. Time can only be redeemed. Life is too short to waste it on anything that is not a priority. At the end of your life, you don’t want to find yourself saying all the things you wish you had done “instead of…”
Evaluate Your Priorities
Covey suggested a matrix of four quadrants to help analyze, categorize and prioritize activities in your life:[1]
The object is to spend as much time as possible in quadrant 2 activities and as little time as possible in level 4. That will leave some margin for dealing with crises and essential urgent tasks as they arise. It will also help you to keep some of those important activities from becoming urgent.
Quadrant 3 often represents other people’s urgencies that are not necessarily your priorities. This is where you have to establish good boundaries and stick to your own priorities.
Act on Your Priorities
I have never been a very good tennis player, but for several months I took off every Wednesday afternoon to play with a colleague who was a dedicated tennis player. Every week I submitted myself to a clobbering—I might win one or two games out of three sets. Some of the folks in our office thought I was wasting time in a quadrant 4 activity, but in reality I was in my quadrant 2. This was a good way to build a relationship with a colleague who was not totally on board with some of the leadership decisions I had made and this was the only time we could get together regularly. We had some non-threatening conversations on the way to the courts, between games and after I caught my breath at the end of the beating every week. We got to know more about each other’s dreams and aspirations and how these were not so mutually exclusive as we might have thought. At the same time I also got some good exercise and, perhaps, improved my game a little.
Measure the Effectiveness of Your Priorities
Effective leaders understand that activity is not necessarily the best measurement of accomplishment. John Maxwell suggests two guidelines for measuring activity and determining priorities. The first is based on the Pareto Principle:[2] “If you focus your attention on the activities that rank in the top 20 percent in terms of importance, you will have an 80 percent return on your effort.”[3]
The second guideline is what Maxwell calls the three Rs: requirement, return and reward. He asks three questions to help leaders order their lives and eliminate activities of lesser priority for greater effectiveness:
1. What is required? “Anything required that’s not necessary for you to do personally should be delegated or eliminated.”
2. What gives the greatest return? Leaders should spend most of their time working in the areas of their greatest strength. To accomplish this, “if something can be done 80 percent as well by someone else in your organization, delegate it.”
3. What brings the greatest reward? Maxwell indicates that leaders should concentrate on the activities about which they are most passionate to help them stay energized.[4]
Just Say No
In a practical sense, the most useful word in the leader’s vocabulary might be the word “no.” Only by saying no to some activities that are lower priorities in your relationships can you give the priority time to those relationships that are of higher priority. Whenever you say “yes” to one thing, you are automatically saying “no” to a myriad of other ways you could be occupying the time. If you are one of those people who has trouble saying no, try this: put your tongue on your hard palette and form an oval with your lips while making a nasal sound, and then rapidly drop your tongue. Try it with me… nnnnnnno! Practice several times. See, you can do it! Try doing it with a smile. That’s more challenging, isn’t it? J
Hint to the Leader
· Ask for help identifying things you could decide NOT to do so that you can dedicate yourself more to the things that are required, that give the greatest return, and that bring the greatest reward.
· Try to find at least one thing to which you can say “no.”
· Find something in your calendar NOT to do. Pass it off to someone else, postpone it, or simply cancel it. If someone else could do it, then let them!
· Look for ways to simplify your life.
· LISTEN to the people you lead to be sure you are not overloading them beyond their power.
Hint to the Follower
· Learn to say “no” to lower priorities so you can say “yes” to the higher priorities in your life.
· As you look for ways to keep the margin in your own life, watch also for things you could do to free up your leader so the leader can do things that only he or she must or should be doing.
· Take initiative in offering to help.
· If you feel helpless to say “no” to your boss and your plate is truly full, try explaining that if you take on one more project, everything else you are doing will suffer. List your current priorities and ask what place the new project should occupy in that list. If you can think of someone else who might be qualified to take on the new task, say so.
© Dr. Larry N. Gay
February 2010
[1] Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1989 and 2004.
[2] For more on the Pareto Principle, see www.pinnicle.com/Articles/Pareto_Principle/pareto_principle.html
[3]John C. Maxwell, The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership: Follow Them and People Will Follow You, (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1998), 176-177.
[4] Maxwell, 177-178.
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