Friday, June 1, 2012

Choice 1: Act on the Important, Don’t React to the Urgent

The five weeks during the month of June will be dedicated to content from FranklinCovey’s newest program, The 5 Choices of Extraordinary Productivity.  Please enjoy today’s post, written by my friend and colleague, Mark Murphy.
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Choice 1: Act on the Important, Don’t React to the Urgent
How many of you get e-mails in the middle of the night?
How many of you sleep with your phone?
How many of you feel buried by a mountain of gravel and keep thinking if you just work harder or faster you can get it all done?
The Paradox:  It’s both easier and harder than ever to achieve extraordinary productivity.  In most organizations, there are fewer people doing more things with fewer resources in exactly the same amount of time.  And technology, with all its benefits, creates an expectation of immediacy to most everything.
An ongoing survey of more than 350,000 people since 2005 shows that people, by their own admission,  spend about 70 percent of their time on whatever is urgent and only about 30 percent on relevant and important priorities.  Think about that!  What if your cell phone only worked three of every eight hours?  What if your car only worked a couple of random days a week?  Also think of the possibilities if you could do no more than just reverse those numbers?
Productivity is not just about “getting it all done”.  It’s about getting the right things done.  It’s the product of our decisions, where we focus our attention, and our energy levels. 
The Promise:  There are 5 Choices that, when consistently made, ensure that you will achieve extraordinary productivity in your work and life.
Choice 1:  Act on the Important, Don’t React to the Urgent
Dr. Edward M. Hallowell, MD of the Hallowell Center for Cognitive and Emotional Health says that “the key symptoms of ADD;  distractibility, impulsivity, restlessness, disorganization, trouble planning, procrastination, have come to be key attributes of most people working and living in today’s world”.  “The symptoms of overloaded circuits are very similar to the symptoms of Attention Deficit Disorder”. 
The prefrontal cortex part of the brain is the action center of the brain.  It’s where we do higher-level tasks like planning and making careful choices.  And it’s overwhelmed.
Meanwhile, the reactive, primitive/emotional part of the brain has more and more stimuli to react to, given the constant flood of interruptions we live with. 
It’s interesting to consider that we are physiologically programmed to respond to urgencies.  That response mechanism has been passed down to us from our ancestors whose response to urgency was often truly a life-or-death decision.  When faced with a threat, our ancestors got a shot of adrenaline that raised the heart rate, widened the blood vessels, and sped up breathing.  It made them quick, strong reactors. 
But what was once a rare occurrence now happens all the time.  We confront urgent demands all day long.  And that same circuitry that can make us reactive can also make us addicted. 
An excellent model to illustrate this is the Time Matrix.

We often spend our time in the urgencies of Quadrants 1 and 3 all day long.  We become so exhausted that our natural tendency at the end of the day is to go straight to Quadrant 4.  And the next day we start the whole process over again.  We, in essence, create a Bermuda Triangle for ourselves that literally sucks us in.  And the only Quadrant being neglected ends up being Quadrant 2 which is where real productivity most often occurs. 
There are very good reasons for this.  In many organizations Quadrants 1 and 3 are high visibility and are often the most recognized and rewarded activities.  Quadrant 2 activities are often “under the radar” and less noticed at the time.
Also, if urgent things are neglected there is a very quick negative impact to not doing them.  So we often focus on them to the exclusion of Quadrant 2 (important) items, which if neglected, often have a deferred, but much larger negative impact.  In short, we become addicted to the urgent. 
It becomes critical to create a Quadrant 2 culture, which may not be as hard as we might expect.  It often begins with the courage to start some conversations around topics like:
  1. Identifying the top two or three Q2 activities that could make a significant impact on the team or organizational goals.
  2. Determining the value of those Q2 activities (impact on the bottom line, customer loyalty, problem prevention, key relationships, etc.)
  3. Identifying two or three Q3 activities that hinder these Q2 activities and discuss how to eliminate them.
Based on the Time Matrix we can create a culture that is focused on the important and not just the urgent.  It allows us the ability to have conversations within our circle of influence that are focused on Q2 and reduce the time spent in Q3.  “The very best leaders are focused on the language of importance instead of the language of urgency”.  We can ask questions like, why should this be done now?  Or how does this help us achieve our goals?  If everyone understands the Time Matrix we can create a shorthand language with questions like, is that really a Q2? Or, are you sure that’s a Q1 because it feels an awful lot like a Q3?   In short…so we can create a Q2 culture that allows us to spend time on what is most important and will generate the best results. 
Without a shared language of importance it is really easy to get distracted from the things that really impact the results.
- Mark Murphy, FranklinCovey Consultant
Copyright © 2012 - Mark Murphy
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Join us next week as we continue to dive into The 5 Choices content, with Choice 2: Go for Extraordinary, Don’t Settle for Ordinary.
Enabling Greatness, One Organization at Time,
John Vakidis

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