immediately, and usually have tight timelines.
Once you are caught up with your urgent and important tasks, you should
turn your attention to those tasks that are important but not urgent. The more
time you can spend working on important tasks with serious long-term
potential consequences, the more effective you become and the more you
will accomplish.
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Identify Your Limiting Step
An important technique for setting priorities revolves around what is called
the “Limiting Step Principle.” Between you and any goal you want to
accomplish, there is almost invariably a limiting factor, or bottleneck, that
determines the speed at which you accomplish your goal. One of the keys to
personal effectiveness is to look at each job and ask, “What one factor
determines how quickly I complete this job?”
Apply this principle of “constraint analysis” to your work hour-by-hour, and
day-by-day. Keep asking, “What is the constraint that determines how fast
and how well I complete this task?” Whatever it is, go to work immediately
in that area. This is your top priority, and alleviating this constraint will help
you to accomplish your most important task faster than anything else you
could do.
For example, if you want to get to work on time, you could say that the
constraint is the amount of traffic that will be on the roads between your
home and your work. But perhaps the traffic is always the same. Then your
constraint would be how early you leave home for work, to allow for the
traffic. Or perhaps your constraint is the hour at which you arise in the
morning so that you can get fully prepared and leave the house on time.
Apply Constraint Analysis to Each Task
When you examine each of your goals, small or large, short-term or long-
term, and identify the constraint, chokepoint or limiting factor that
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determines how fast you achieve that goal, you will see clearly the specific
actions you will have to take to achieve your goal on schedule.
Once you have identified your limiting factor, you then concentrate all of
your energies on alleviating that specific bottleneck. You focus your
intelligence and creativity on finding ways to remove this constraint so that
you can accomplish your goal far faster.
Once you have identified the constraint that is setting the speed at which you
achieve your goal, and alleviate it, you will find that another constraint
exists immediately behind it. A key part of personal effectiveness is for you
to engage in an on-going process of “constraint analysis.” Keep asking
yourself, “What sets the speed at which I accomplish this specific goal, or
complete this task?”
Look Into Yourself or Company
The 80/20 Rule applies to constraint analysis in a special way. It seems that
80% of the limiting factors that determine your success at home or at work
are contained within yourself. Only 20% is actually contained within the
situation, the company or the environment. This is an important observation.
The average person always looks for the reason for his or her problems
outside of themselves. The experienced person on the other hand always
looks for the reasons inside himself or inside the organization.
In most cases, the reasons that you are not achieving your personal goals are
because of the lack of a skill, ability, quality or talent. The problems or
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frustrations you are experiencing on the outside are almost always a result of
some lack or need that you have on the inside.
One of my rules is that, “To achieve a goal you’ve never achieved before,
you are going to have to develop and master a skill that you’ve never had
before.” It may be that to achieve one of your important goals, you are going
to have to become a different person. You are going to have to develop skills
and qualities that you are currently lacking. You are going to have to
become a different person if you want to get different results.
Always take a few minutes to stand back from your situation and analyze it
objectively, as though you were a consultant who had been called in from
the outside. Then ask, “What is it in me, or in my company, that is holding
me back?”
What Else Is Holding You Back?
When I do sales consulting for organizations, I help them think through this
process from beginning to end. First, we set a hypothetical goal of doubling
their sales. We then ask, “What is the limiting factor that determines how
quickly you double your sales in this company?”
The first and most common answer is “the number of sales we make.” If this
answer is true, we set a tentative goal to double the number of sales.
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We then ask, “What is the constraint or limiting factor that determines the
number of sales that you make?” The answers to this question can lead in
several different directions and suggest different solutions.
For example, the answer may be, “We are not making enough sales.” If this
is the correct answer, or constraint, then the solution is to find a way to
increase the number of sales sales.
Perhaps the answer is, “Our salespeople are not selling enough to each of
our prospects.” If this were the answer, then the skills and abilities of the
sales force will need to be upgraded through training and development.
Identify the Correct Constraint
Perhaps the reason we are not selling enough is, “Our prospects are buying
too much of our product from our competitors.” If this is the answer, the
solution to alleviating the bottleneck may be to change or upgrade the
product or service, to focus on different customers and markets, to develop
new products and services, or to use different distribution channels.
Perhaps the answer can be rephrased as, “Our customers are not buying
enough of our products from us.” In this case, the solution is to advertise
more effectively, sell more professionally, explain the product to the
prospect in such a way that it is more attractive, or to close more assertively.
Perhaps the solution to increasing sales is to improve the effectiveness of the
advertising, or to advertise in a different media. Perhaps it is to change the
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prices and terms of purchase. Perhaps it is to change the size, packaging or
ingredients of the offer. Whatever the answer, the time taken to correctly
identify the limiting factor determines the specific actions that will be taken
to alleviate that constraint and achieve the desired result of sales
improvement.
The point is this. The more thoughtfully that you engage in constraint
analysis, the more likely it is that you will select the correct area of focus to
alleviate the chokepoint and achieve the goal. You will set the correct
priorities and save yourself an enormous amount of time and money.
Remember, “The very worst use of time is to do something extremely well
that need not be done at all.”
Think About the Future Consequences
In setting priorities, one of the most important thinking exercises you engage
in is to consider the future impact of any action you take. One of the ways to
measure the value or importance of a task is to look at what might happen if
the task is done or not done. Something that has a high potential future
impact on your life or work is a task of high priority. Something that will
have little or no impact on your future is a task of low priority and value.
For example, if you were to read this book on time management and
incorporate the very best ideas contained here into your ways of living and
working, you could double your productivity, performance and output. You
could accomplish vastly more and be paid at a far higher rate. You could
dramatically increase the value of your contribution to your company and
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become one of the top people in your field. On this basis, reading this book,
and becoming extremely skilled at time management, is a top priority for
you because of its long-term future impact.
At home, playing with your children and spending time with your family has
potential long-term impact for their happiness and health. Investing time in
the most important people in your life is therefore a top priority because of
the impact it can have on their future, and yours.
On the other hand, watching television, reading the newspaper, surfing the
Internet or going out to lunch with your friends, are activities of low priority
because they have little or no potential impact in the long term.
Keep asking yourself, “What are the possible consequences of doing or not
doing this particular task?” What are the consequences of engaging in this
particular activity? If it can have significant consequences, it should be at the
top of your list. Engaging in this activity should be a far better use of time
than most of the other things you can do.
Practice Creative Procrastination
An important part of setting priorities is the practice of “creative
procrastination.” The fact is that everyone procrastinates. Everyone has too
much to do and too little time. In one recent study, the researchers concluded
that the average executive has 300-400 hours of projects, responsibilities and
reading materials stacked up that they have not been able to get to, but which
they hope to get through in the future.
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Because you cannot do everything, you have to procrastinate on many
things, if not most things. Creative procrastination requires that you
deliberately decide, at a conscious level, the items that you are going to
procrastinate on so that you have more time to do those things that can really
make a difference in your life.
Apply the 80/20 Rule to procrastination. Resolve to procrastinate on the
80% of tasks that are of low value so that you can dedicate the limited
amount of time you have to those 20% of tasks that have the highest value.
Return on Time Invested
In terms of value, and “return on time invested” (ROTI), if you have a list of
ten tasks to complete, two of those tasks will be worth more than all the
others put together. This means that each of those tasks will be worth at least
five times, or give you a 500% return on time invested, over doing any of the
other eight tasks on your list which are of low or no value. Focusing on these
two tasks will give you the highest payoff possible for the investment of
your time.
It has been said that effectiveness is doing the right things and efficiency is
doing things right. The difference between leaders and managers is that
leaders do the right things, and managers simply do things right. In setting
priorities, you must focus on doing the right thing, rather than simply doing
things right. As a knowledge worker, according to Peter Drucker, your first
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job is to decide “what” is to be done? The questions of how and when only
come later. Remember, if it is not worth doing, it is not worth doing right.
Priorities versus Posteriorities
An important part of setting and working on priorities is for you to set
posteriorities as well. A priority is something that you do more of and
sooner. A posteriority is something you do less of, and later, if at all. Setting
priorities means starting something and completing it as quickly as possible.
Setting posteriorities means stopping something or even discontinuing an
activity altogether.
Since you can only do one thing at a time, and you cannot do everything that
you have to do, one of the questions you ask at the beginning of each day
and each week is,”What am I going to stop doing?”
What are you going to cut out? What are you going to eliminate? What
activities are you going to delete? What are you doing today, that knowing
what you now know, you wouldn’t start up again today if you had to do it
over?
Stop Doing Things
The fact is that you can only get control of your time to the degree to which
you stop doing things that you are doing today. You cannot simply find
ways to do more things, to work longer and harder hours. Instead, you have
to stand back and look at your life and work objectively and ask, “What am I
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going to stop doing, so that I have enough time to do the most important
things in my life and work?”
Before you start a new task, remember that, “Your dance card is full.” You
are already overwhelmed with work. You have no spare time. You are
subject to The Law of the Excluded Alternative which says, “Doing one
thing means not doing something else.”
Before you commit to a new task or job, you must think through and decide
upon the things that you are not going to do right now, or which you are
going to eliminate altogether. You must decide how and in what way you are
going to defer, delay or delegate certain tasks on your work list if you are to
free up enough time to do other tasks that are more important. Getting into a
new task means getting out of an old task. Picking up something that you
haven’t done requires putting down something that you were already
working on.
The very act of thinking through what you are going to stop doing is a
tremendous help in setting accurate priorities before you begin.
Practice the ABCDE Method
One of the most helpful ways for you to organize your tasks by priority is for
you to use the ABCDE Method. This requires that you review your list of
daily activities before you begin. You then place one of these letters in front
of each activity. Organize your tasks in terms of potential consequences.
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Your “A” List
An “A” task is something that you must do. It is very important. There are
serious consequences for not doing it. Place an “A” next to every item on
your work list that is urgent and important, and which has serious
consequences for completion or non-completion.
If you have several “A” tasks, organize them by importance by putting “A-1,
A-2, A-3, and so on next to each item. When you begin work, you always
start on your A-1 task. This is your top priority.
