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Persistence: The Power of Perseverance in Achieving Long-Term Goals

Time Management: Mastering Your Priorities

 

The Power of Prioritization:

Effective time management is not just about doing more in less time but about doing the right things at the right time. As leaders, it’s crucial to identify our highest priorities and align our daily activities with our long-term goals. This involves delegating lesser tasks when appropriate and carving out time on the calendar for strategic thinking and important projects. Remember, managing your time well is equivalent to managing your life well, and it’s a key step towards achieving your long-term goals.

 

Action Steps:

  • Audit Your Time: For one week, track how you spend your hours. Identify time wasters and look for patterns where you can consolidate similar tasks.
  • Set Clear Priorities: Each morning, determine the three most crucial tasks that will make your day successful and focus on completing them first.
  • Use Technology Wisely: Leverage tools and apps designed to improve productivity and minimize distractions, like task management software or focus-enhancing apps.

 

Communication: Building Strong Connections

 

Adapting to Your Audience:

Effective leaders understand that communication is not a one-size-fits-all endeavour. It’s essential to tailor your approach (verbal and written) to suit the diverse preferences of your team members, internal and external stakeholders, and clients. Adapting your style to meet varying needs can significantly enhance the strength of your connections and productivity.

 

Action Steps:

  • Listen Actively: Make a conscious effort to listen more than you speak. Understand the underlying messages, not just the words.
  • Regular Feedback: Provide constructive feedback in a timely manner. Make it specific, actionable, and focused on behaviour rather than personality.
  • Practice Transparency: Communicate the “why” behind decisions to foster trust and alignment within your team.

 

Meeting Management: Enhancing Efficiency

 

Streamlining Decision-Making:

Effective meetings are crucial for making decisions and ensuring team alignment. Preparation, an agenda, clear objectives, resulting actions, and timelines are key to managing meetings that are both efficient and productive.

 

Action Steps:

  • Prepare an Agenda: Always circulate a clear agenda before the meeting. Include topics, objectives, and times allotted for each section.
  • Encourage Participation and decision-making: Use strategies like asking open-ended questions to encourage everyone’s contribution and keep the meeting dynamic. If a decision is to be made in the meeting, ensure it is made and communicated with clarity.
  • Follow Up: End each meeting with clear action items, responsibilities, and timelines. Within 24 hours, send out a summary to ensure everyone is on the same page.

 

Presence: Commanding Respect and Attention

 

Acting with Intention:

A leader’s presence is about the ability to command attention and inspire action. This requires self-awareness, control over your emotions, and the ability to project confidence even under pressure.

 

Action Steps:

  • Be Consistently Engaged: Show genuine interest in your interactions, whether in person or virtual. Maintain eye contact, nod your understanding, and avoid distractions.
  • Set the Tone: Your demeanour sets the tone for your team. Use a calm, confident voice and body language that conveys openness and respect.
  • Reflect on Your Impact: Regularly reflect on how others perceive your presence. Seek feedback and be willing to adjust to maintain or enhance your effectiveness.

 

In closing this month’s newsletter, we hope that these practical action steps will enhance your effectiveness in these areas, driving better results and stronger team dynamics.

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Goals Set your Direction & Systems Help you Make Progress

Your days are jam-packed; however, you often feel by days end that you have accomplished little as your time has been spent on low-value tasks, putting out fires, and getting caught up in the day-to-day business minutia. There is never enough time to focus on what is important; your goals are defined; however, you can’t seem to make progress on moving them forward. Sound familiar?

 

You Can Get Frustrated Before You Make Progress

If you are frustrated by your progress on moving goals forward, it is time to reset how you are prioritizing the work that needs to be done on your goals, the processes you have in place to focus on the ‘next best step,’ and systems to enable you to work smarter, not harder on the work at hand.

 

Goals set direction and can help keep you organized.

 

Processes outline what you need to do – step-by-step actions.

 

Systems help you achieve your goals and make progress – a critical component for all, no matter what industry you are in or the position you hold.

Make Progress at work

Implement a System 

The implementation of process, technical and time management systems are critical to enabling you to make progress on your goals. I have outlined below systems that I use daily:

 

Process System

  • I utilize the 80/20 rule when determining goal focus. Using the Pareto Principle, or 80/20 rule, I appreciate that 80% of my business outcomes are usually a result of 20% of my efforts around my top goals. So, when working on my goals daily, I commence working on high-value tasks associated with a top-level goal, which in turn provides the greatest return on my time investment. When using the 80/20 rule, a simple trick is to ask yourself daily when mapping out your schedule: ‘What goal focus should I concentrate on today that will provide the greatest impact?’. 

Technical Systems

  • The client CRM I use is HubSpot. The project management software I use is Trello to manage goals, task assignments, staff communication, the delegation of tasks, reporting, and metrics. 

Time Management Systems:

  • When scheduling my time, I allocate a minimum of two hours daily to focus on high-value goals that significantly impact my consultancy. I block of uninterruptable time chunks in my Outlook calendar and couldn’t live without my Full Focus Paper Planner to keep me on track. By having this identified time blocked out daily, I make guaranteed goal progress. You need to remember two words that go hand in hand with your time management systems, RELENTLESS CONSISTENCY – this will help you move forward in your goal attainment and track if you make progress. 

 

7 Steps To Help You Stay On Track And Make Progress:

  1. Determine your goals; they set your direction
  2. Under each goal, detail the associated tasks and timelines
  3. Set critical milestone dates, and ensure reporting metric expectations are communicated
  4. Detail the strategy as to how you will approach and achieve the goal
  5. Focus first on the top 20% of goals that will provide the most significant impact.
  6. Set aside time daily to work on ‘the next best step’ of the goal. Do this in uninterruptable time chunks. The daily allocation of time will make a significant difference in your goal timeline.
  7. Be relentlessly consistent – action should be taken daily for the greatest momentum

 

Make progress in life

Atomic Habits 

If you have not read Atomic Habits, I encourage you to do so. James Clear’s reference around the importance of small habits making a big difference is critical to address procrastination and move your goals forward. An example in his book given is one that I often refer to with clients, ‘The effects of small habits compound over time. For example, if you can get just 1 percent better each day, you’ll end up with results that are nearly 37 times better after one year.’ Now that is progress!

Evaluate Your System

I hope this article has motivated you to evaluate your current systems to ensure they are working to your best advantage—work smarter, not harder, for greater productivity, balance, and increased results. Be relentlessly consistent in your actions; small steps compounded make a significant difference to your bottom line. 

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Planning + Action + Consistency + Outcome Recording = AMAZING RESULT.

Consistency is Key

 

Being relentlessly consistent in your actions will enable significant results. Just like compound interest, your continual and focused effort towards your professional and personal goals will reap considerable results.

 

It is so easy to get distracted from working on what is important. We all walk a tightrope of responsibilities that cross over between our busy professional and personal lives, and the following are some of the most common challenges that are shared with me:

 

  • Since COVID, I am working remotely; however, I now feel like I am on 24/7. I am exhausted and have no time for myself.
  • I don’t have the time to work on what matters. I know I have to; however, my day-to-day responsibilities and leading my team take up every waking hour.
  • I am overwhelmed. Everything has become more complex, and I know I need to simplify, but I am just too tired even to start.

 

These challenges are real, and without intentional action to make a change, it won’t miraculously occur. I can honestly share with you that I want to make a significant impact, be effective and productive, demonstrate innovation, be creative, continually grow, attain stretch results, and all while enjoying what I love to do. Do you?

Do you need a reboot?

It can be done. You need to decide to make the changes necessary, schedule time to focus on the action required and… simply start. Given the climate that we are working and living in today, getting back on track and doing so quickly will benefit you in so many ways. You do not need to struggle with stressors, complexity, ambiguity or uncertainty in your professional or personal life. So let’s get back on track to enable you to be the best person you can be, and while doing so, enjoy yourself. If you decide to raise your game, guess what, you will do so. When you raise your game, others will notice, and you will then be more impactful to your team. Think of this as an expansionary action. You will need to be motivated to work on what matters, be consistent in your action and be dedicated to carving time in your schedule to make things happen.

 

Review your processes

Daily routines, scheduled blocked off uninterrupted time to work on goals and identified processes in all aspects of your work to streamline what you do and how you do it are all key. Processes help you stay on track, provide consistent levels of service, take away the complexity of task management, save you time and enhance your performance.

Stick with a system

Whether you use Trello, Asana, Evernote, a paper day timer, or a CRM, commit to a system to keep yourself organized. Keeping on top of what needs to be done by when ideas and scheduled follow up will help you stay focused and productive. In my system, I keep track of my quarterly goals and actions, weekly focus points and a running ideas list of ideas to ensure I remain innovative in my approach to work. You may have to play around with multiple systems initially; however, limit the time you will give yourself to find the right one for you. If you have a system, yet have not been using it, now is the time to go back to the basics. Commit to your system (new or current) for the next 90 days and then circle back to me and let me know your results.

 

Raise your game

You want to be the best you can be, so rather than thinking about it, start acting that way. Step up your game, practice the Golden Rule of treating others how you wish to be treated. Be true to what you need to focus on, and do not let other priorities take over from the time you need to work on your goals. When you focus on how you work, how you want to be perceived and lean into the changes that you know you need to make to improve your ‘presence’ factor, it will occur. Listen intently, be aware of your posture and body language (yes even if you are only in front of a computer screen on a zoom call – it matters), choose words carefully, smile often and look for the joy in what you are doing, it will be acknowledged and is contagious to others. How successful are you in meeting your daily, weekly or monthly targets? It is so easy to get bogged down with the day to day and fall into busy, rather than strategic work. Focusing on the right thing, and being consistent in daily action to move forward is the key to success.

 

 

Get comfortable with saying ‘No’ more than ‘Yes.’

Allocate 30 minutes to look closely at your schedule for the next three weeks. If there are any meetings or activities that are in your schedule that you do not need to attend, send your regrets, and either have someone else attend on your behalf or advise why you do not need to be involved. Compare your schedule against your goals. If you have time blocked off to work on items that are not in your top 7-10 goal areas, then determine if this is the right way to be spending your time. For every new request, before automatically saying ‘yes’ really think about your answer, it is just as easy to say ‘no,’ I promise!

 

Batch tasks

Create a checklist of tasks that can be batched and schedule them in your weekly calendar.

I have a running list of quick 2 minutes jobs that I schedule in an hour block daily. I use the hour after lunch, where my energy is a little waned, and I need a kickstart to the afternoon. I batch social media postings and also writing time, whether it be for blog posts or project proposals.

 

Track your outputs

Your outputs are in your control – you will see that tracking them and being relentlessly consistent in your action will expedite your ability to move your work forward.

 

Delegate when you can

The answer is not to do more. Life does not have to be lived in a constant state of emergency, nor do you have to do everything alone to feel that the task at hand is done in the right way. Delegate when you can, you do not have to do it all. There is no merit in continuously pushing items onto the ‘I have to do this later’ mile-long list. Focus on where you add value. Work out how your time is best utilized and as other tasks arise that are not in your superpower zone, then move them on.

 

Contact Me

So many tips, so much to do but really – the first step is the most critical, and that is STARTING.

 

If you would feel like you would be a good candidate for my Executive Coaching Program, please book a time through my Calendly link, and I would be happy to have a 15-minute introductory connection with you.

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