There are only a finite number of productive hours in your day. Every leader is busy and often it feels like there isn’t enough time to accomplish everything you planned. Is ‘busyness’ your excuse for not investing enough time to build your business? Is it sabotaging your growth?
How many of your hours are wasted on simple, routine activities that rob you of valuable time and distract you from your planned productive day? You shift from one task to another – dealing with personnel issues, checking your mail, attending meetings that don’t really require your input – and then wonder where the time has gone.
Here are 3 signs that you are wasting your productive hours and compromising your success:
1. Lack of Accountability – You may be the senior leader so you can hold your associates accountable for accomplishing their assigned goals, but who is holding you accountable? When you look back a year from now, will you have accomplished what you planned? Find a trusted advisor to assist you & hold you accountable.
2. Lack of Metrics – Establish metric for your goals. How will you measure progress towards a goal without defining a metric that you and your team can monitor? Continually measuring key attributes of your business will preserve focus, saving time and money. And it will provide a basis for evaluating accountability and ROI. Understand what your financials are telling you – know your primary drivers (sales, gross profit, throughput, breakeven, cash flow, etc.) – and track them at least weekly.
3. Excessive Perfectionism – Disproportionate devotion to perfectionism paralyzes decision-making and causes redundancy that wastes energy, time and money. Identify the most valuable portions of your business activity and focus most of your direct effort (80%) on these functions. Delegate other tasks, establishing accountability and specifying metrics to foster productivity.
Don’t expect yourself to change your established behaviors overnight. Research clearly indicates we succeed in changing behaviors only after the stimulus is continually repeated for a minimum of 21 consecutive days. Change requires time, consistency and perseverance.
How do ensure that ‘busyness’ doesn’t consume your day?
Who is holding you accountable?
