Executives and business ownders can be guilty of spending their days fire-fighting the latest emergency, rather than investing their time and energy into intentional actions that impact business success.
Long term, failure to get off the dance floor and onto the balcony translates into low focus on matters of high importance, with potentially catastrophic results.
Long term, failure to get off the dance floor and onto the balcony translates into low focus on matters of high importance, with potentially catastrophic results.
The 7-step Productivity Breakthrough System is designed to shift executives and business owners from constant fire-fighting into a flourishign state of productivity greatness, moving into intentional action that multiplies impact and results.
The Productivity Breakthrough system includes the following 7 steps:
Step 1: Purpose
The more senior your role within an organisation, the more important it is for you to achieve absolute clarity of purpose. In this context, purpose applies to your personal 'why' and equally to the business' purpose or mission.
What is it that you need to deliver to ensure the success and sustainabilty of your organisation or the division you manage? A large part of your role will require sense-making about shifts within your industry and positioning your organisation to remain competitive and relevant. Whilst this work may not appear to be particularly busy, it is signficantly important. Trading this in exclusive favour of attending to operational needs will translate into overwhelming challenges when the business runs out of runway.
Productivity is not only about getting stuff done, it is about getting the right stuff done.
The question to ask yourself here is - what are the few but important things that I must do that will impact my organisation's long-term success and sustainability?
Productivity is not only about getting stuff done, it is about getting the right stuff done.
Step 2: Prioritise
You may have heard the statement that if everything is important, nothing is important. All things cannot have the same priority. Attempting to do too much results in efforts being broad and shallow, whereas important work like thinking and sense making often need to be narrow and deep.
This speaks to the Pareto Principle, commonly known as the 80/20 rule. Research shows time and again that 20% of your efforts deliver 80% of your results. Yet, most of us focus 80% of our time on the busywork that only delivers 20% of the results.
Prioritising requires that you carefully consider what will deliver the results you must achieve (short and long-term) within the context of the resources available to you.
Step 3: Plan
Planning requires that you figure out how you are going to achieve the goals that you have set. Without a plan, goals (personal and organisational) remain wishes and dreams. Successful achievement of goals requires resource allocation, a project plan and associated timelines.
I am a great believer in to-do lists (for reasons that I will showcase in a forthcoming article). Prepare a list of the high level actions required. Of course, there may be times when the full scope of the undertaking is unknown, and in that instance, the list becomes more granular as the project becomes better defined. Key is to plan what is known, whilst allowing the unknown to unfold.
Once you know what must be done and when, schedule it. What gets scheduled gets done. What doesn't get scheduled simply gets forgotten in the operational pressures and focus on urgent deliverables.
The question to answer in planning is - What steps do I need to take - and when do I need to take them - to bring this project to it's successful fruition? What resources do I need to allocate? And, what does success look like?
4. Prepare
Preparing is all about getting organised, and ensuring that when you sit down at your desk to do the task you have scheduled in the planning phase, you have everything you need. Without preparation, we tend to spend more time looking for tools and reference material than we do in peforming the actual work.
Everything that you need to perform the scheduled task must be readily accessible to you. Ideally, this would be stored in a physical or cloud-based computer folder. At no point during the 'working' time should you be hunting around for a piece of paper you made a note on, or a set of minutes to verify something. Everything you need to perform must be readily available.
5. Perform
It's no surprise then that perform is the next step. Once you have prepared your action, it is now time to dedicate quality time to delivery. Rather than grabbing a cup of coffee or engaging in office chat, this is the time that you buckle down and do what is scheduled. This sounds like the simplest of steps, but we can often grapple with procrastination at a time where we most need to be taking action.
Procrastination and distraction are likely the two biggest productivity killers.
6. Problem-solve
Productivity requires you to problem-solve in the moment. This act of mindfulness necessitates that you are aware of how productive you are being in the moment, and to take instant corrective action where needed. It's pointless arriving at the end of your work-session and thinking that was a waste of time. As you identify that you are not being effective, productivity requires that you reconfigure your approach.
The question to ask yourself frequently is - What could I do to achieve this task to the same or better level of quality, but in half the time?
7. Pioneer
Once you have applied the these six steps within the 7-step system, it's time to step up your productivity into a new level. This can include add-ons such as cultivating a morning routine that sets you up for success, applying techniques such time chunking and scheduling your day to match times of high and low energy, and of course, getting to understand your own behaviours to the extent that you get yourself to do your best work when you've scheduled it.
In conclusion, productivity can be significantly enhanced by applying the 7-Step Productivity Breakthough system. Quite simply, people who learn to be productive are more successful and more satisfied than those struggling with an overwhelming to-do list that simply never gets actioned.
If you would like to find out more about the Productivity Greatness program, contact info@greatnessstrategies.com or schedule a discovery call here.
