Is your calendar making you a busy fool?
Posted on June 19, 2020 by Paul O'Dea
Time is the great enemy in growth companies; too much to do, lots of meetings, hard to make the right impact. What you were doing last year may not be what you should do this year.
You know the time-crunch symptoms. Everything is a rush. Last minute impatience creates stress. Procrastination and indecisiveness make 'to do' lists longer. You feel handcuffed to email technology.
Many calendars are defined by comfort zone. The accountant will spend too much time on the numbers, the engineer on production or the marketer on branding. Yet the leaders job should not be defined by his or her comfort zone but by the critical challenges facing their company.
Your calendar is a great guide to how well you are investing your time. Ask yourself - what percentage of your time are you spending ‘in the business’ doing the day to day transactional and comfort zone stuff like meetings, customer relations and numbers.
Is your calendar making you a busy fool? What percentage of your time are you spending ‘on the business’ – on the big questions like:
- Where do you want to be in 3 years?
- What type of team and capability do you need to build?
Why not take five minutes now and look at your calendar over the last three months. What could you do less of, more of or keep doing - to have a real impact on your company’s ambitions? What big issues have you been avoiding? What activities were a waste of time? Ask those close to you what they think.
Now test whether your calendar is really aligned with the top challenges in your company? What do you need to change? What should you delegate? What new things should you start doing?
As a leader, how you spend your time has a big impact on your team. It reflects the priorities of the business. If you continue to schedule your calendar in a transactional way, then your team will do the same and this will ultimately damage performance. Have you ever thought what would happen if you set aside and dedicated half a day every week to figuring out important things like how to transform your business growth?
Don’t let your calendar make you a busy fool! Our experience is that CEOs who are business growth transformers, create this 'important space' to review existing practices, analyse the 'big questions' and improve their business dramatically.
