What Should You Be Doing?

Most people find, or think, they have too much to do.  Naturally, they try and concentrate on those things that they consider to be the most important.

However even this can be fraught with difficulty. If you are not clear about your long-term goals, deciding what is important is difficult.

Here is a 'trick' worth trying.

List the three things that you think are the really important goals in your life/career.  Notice 'goals' not 'dreams'.

Then for each one of these core goals, list the 3,4 or 5 tasks you need to accomplish in order to further the core goals.   

That gives you approximately 15 tasks you need to carry out to make progress towards reaching your goals.  Now divide these tasks into short, medium and longer term.  This gives a very broad outline future schedule.

Is this scheduled achievable? Think carefully!

If not, you need to :

Remove some of the tasks from your schedule; or

Move some tasks into the next further away time period - say, from short-term to medium-term.

Eventually, you get what you consider a realistic schedule. 

Now you have to create weekly or daily actions that help you carry out these tasks. 

Again check that the resulting schedule of activity is realistic.

Then start working through these daily or weekly tasks.

At the end of each week, review progress and amend the schedule if necessary.

If you are not making reasonable progress, it suggests the tasks/aims are not sufficiently important to you

Think again about your goals and aspirations.  Think critically and be realistic.  

Reflect, rinse and repeat.

Productivity is not about cost-cutting

Many people (even quite a lot of managers and directors) think that productivity improvement involves cutting costs.  It can - and certainly cutting costs should improve productivity.  However this should not form the basis of a productivity improvement strategy.

Concentrating on cutting costs tends to lead to, at best, sub-optimal changes in the organisation and, at worst, a disastrous s loss of vital skills and expertise.

Productivity improvement should not form part of an organisation's strategy - it should BE the strategy.  The aim should be to make revolutionary and/or incremental changes to what the organisation does - and how it does it - in pursuit of improved quality, resilience and overall excellence.

Such changes should then drive improvements in revenue and lowering of costs (pro rata to output).  So cost-cutting is the result of an effective productivity improvement strategy, not the basis of it. 

Diagnosis looks simple

I read a lot of papers and articles about productivity - or more usually, about the lack of productivity.  Most Western nations have had little productivity growth over the last few years.

Many of these articles will make some kind of diagnosis - what has gone wrong or what needs putting right.   Occasionally I think that some of these diagnoses are correct - or is that just because the views coincide with my own.

However, the people making these diagnoses are generally academics, economists or consultants.  They are not people with the responsibility to take action to solve the problem - they make the diagnosis but have no responsibility for carrying out the cure.

Those who do have that responsibility perhaps get overwhelmed and confused by the number of, and variety of, the various diagnoses.  They tend to fall back on ‘standard’ cause and effect scenarios - so we get no innovative treatments or courses of action.

Now if those responsible were to ask me …….