Jan 14, 2015

Ever have a day when you did lots of ‘stuff’ and you are worn out but you didn’t get around to achieving the big tasks you intended to? In a previous blog post, I was talking about how we can get caught up in the frenetic activity of Stephen Covey’s Quadrant 1, especially around Christmas and the New Year. From the Melbourne Cup to the end of the year, we can also get knocked off course by distractions and slip into Covey’s lower quadrants. In January because there are a lot of events on and some are still on holidays, there are still plenty of distractions. Certainly, we can get knocked off track by the pleasant Quadrant Four things in our workplace that perhaps give us a fillip but are not necessarily the best use of our time. Of course, we can also get derailed by other people’s agendas in Quadrant Three. These are often the hardest to manage because they become disguised as items of importance. I was recently reminded of the author of ‘Rich Dad/Poor Dad’, Robert Kyosaki’s great mnemonic for concentration: FOCUS.

Follow One Course Until Successful

In the early 1900s, Charles M. Schwab, the head of Bethlehem Steel Corporation, paid public relations pioneer, Ivy Lee $25,000, (an extraordinary sum at the time) for a simple piece of advice. Schwab, already very successful at the time, said it had been the most profitable advice he had received. What was the advice? Lee famously advised managers to list and number their top priorities every day, and work on tasks in the order of their importance until daily time allows, not proceeding to the next until the previous task was completed. It was the second part of the advice that Schwab found most rewarding. In other words, follow one course until successful (but make sure it is the most important thing for you to be doing). It’s still just as important today as one hundred years ago.