When it comes to habit change, Start Small (Habit Series 5/7)

When you are thinking about starting a new habit, it seems like resistance has other ideas.  Partly because some people devise an elaborate plan and create grandiose expectations.  No wonder it is hard to follow habits when the bar is already fixed so impossibly high before you have even begun.  When we start small, pick one, and jump in, substantial things happen.

BJ Fogg, Director of the Persuasive Technology Lab has spent decades thinking about modifying behavior.  One of his key insights is that when we are looking to establish habits, we want to begin with tiny changes. He often uses the example of flossing. You want to start with one tooth. When you set the mental bar so low, you will likely begin and continue until the whole job is done.  In contrast, by designing a higher goal like flossing for 5 minutes 3 times a day, our brains immediately start finding ways to hack our well-intentioned plans.  It is essential to gain some early wins before you expand. 

In thinking about starting small, here are some steps to consider:

1. Define your new habit.  It should be specific, granular, and accomplishable in a minute or less.  The micro-habit is much harder to find an excuse not to do it.  For example, if you want to build a habit to think strategically first thing in the morning, do not just say, “I plan to do some strategic thinking.”  Get more specific, “ I plan to walk into my office and sit with a sheet of paper and pen at my desk for a minute.”  The same technique works for writing, if you are having trouble writing a book, commit to one sentence or 100 words a day.  When you write so little, more will flow out; the initial hurdle of beginning is the hardest.  After, momentum kicks in, taking you for the ride. Also, we have different motivations on different days. If your bar is only to write one sentence a day, you can fulfill that minimum on tough days, but if you are feeling high energy, you can tackle harder goals and write pages, but you do not have to. Einstein offers a good reminder - “everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”

2. Pick one habit at a time.  Leo Babauta, the author of ZenHabits, uses this strategy.  He said, “We’ve all had those moments when you want to declare, ‘I will change starting today! I want to go to bed earlier, eat less sugar, eat more vegetables, exercise more, be more generous, call my mother regularly, stop checking Facebook obsessively, hug my children, write a book, and declutter the house.’ And if you try to do all of that at once, you end up failing at everything.  But when you devote your energy to just one change, you have more success.  Once one part is habitual, you can move on to the next shift.  Greg McKeown, the author of Essentialism, would agree.  He states that you can only be doing one thing at a time so what is the most important thing you want to be working on?  It is a simple, yet profound concept.  If we do not eliminate, we become overcommitted and our energy will be dispersed instead of concentrated in one area.

3. Calibrate expectations.  When people get started with a new endeavor, they almost always overdo it.  Their ambition leads them to think big and set stretch goals. But high achievers with good intentions can fall short.  When we tempter our expectations and take tiny steps consistently, we can radically improve our lives instead of mustering up giant leaps.  If you decide to work out two hours a day for five days a week, it may be hard to continue that pace.   If you do not get into something you can reliably maintain, you will not do it at all or give up quickly.  We win when we take the right steps day in and day out, but when we do too much too soon, we see obstacles and falter.  Instead of beginning with a 2-mile jog, start with a 5-minute walk and build up.  Your outcomes are determined by your moment-to-moment choices until they become your habits.

According to one study, there is a reason why 25% of people abandoned their New Year’s resolution within the same month because some change is hard.  We are adamant about change initially and then we lose steam and sometimes try to do too much too quickly.  It is easy to overestimate the importance of one defining moment and underestimate making small improvements daily.

4. Preserve and maintain.  When you are creating new habits, it is crucial to keep a system of preservation in place.  You may decide to work more so you can hit some financial goals, but what systems are you putting in place to preserve your health or protect your family time?  People tend to go hard on their goals and have them consume their life that they leave little time for other things.  It’s another reason why starting small helps, so you can keep the other aspects of your life intact that feed you energy.

5. Start Now.  You may be wondering – when is the best time to start my habit?  Maybe during the winter when you will not be out as much and not be as tempted.  Perhaps Jan. 1st as a New Year’s resolution?  On a Monday?  Any day but the weekend?  The answer – any of those options work, just start!  As the Chinese Proverb goes, “the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.” And, if you’re saying that you already began too late, well, that might be just another tired script in your mind, it’s never too late.  As Albert Camus reminds us, “those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.”

We can approach habit change as this complicated process or we can tackle it microscopically.  It is the tiniest sparks that can ignite the most remarkable and most sustainable changes.  Let’s start somewhere, anywhere, and let momentum do its work.

Quote of the Day: “We exaggerate yesterday, overestimate tomorrow, underestimate today.” -John Maxwell.

Q:  What’s the first habit you would like to create?  When will you start? Comment and share below, we would love to hear from you!

[The next blog in this series 6/7 will focus on the power of consistency in habit change]

As a leadership development and executive coach, I work with people to cultivate habits that serve them, contact me to explore this topic further.

Now is always the best time to start

Systems For Better Decision-Making (Decision Series 6/8)

To what degree do you think our decisions determine our lives?  Should we stay in a city we have known and enjoyed for a decade-plus or move elsewhere to shake things up? Take a high visibility job with additional responsibilities or focus more on enjoying a balanced and relaxed life? Know when it is time to quit our side hustle or persist? To be human is to be jostled by choice.  I have found that to have an edge in decision-making, we want to have a few systems in place to better guide us.

Here are some helpful systems to consider when we are contemplating making big decisions:

1. Expand your time horizons.   Suzy Welch, a former editor at the Harvard Business Review recommends conducting a 10-10-10 analysis.  For every choice we’re considering, ask ourselves: how will I feel about having done this 10 minutes, 10 months, 10 years from now?   This tool helps create psychological distance when you expand the time horizon and imagine how we would feel in the future.  A challenge we have when making a decision is the emphasis we place on immediate emotions so we avoid doing unpleasant things like asking for a promotion or breaking up with our partner because we may be blinded by the short-term fallout.  By considering how we will feel in the future, we can reduce the intensity of our current emotions and make sounder decisions.  You only have to deal with the short-term once, but the long run for the rest of your life.

A similar idea is to think about 2nd and 3rd order consequences or the downstream ramifications of your actions, which are not always obvious at first. You can decide to take up running and endure the initial pain of working out for the medium-term benefits of getting in shape and feeling great. You may also look further ahead to consider the joint pains you might incur from running on the pavement so perhaps you will want to have a plan to switch to a less impactful exercise such as yoga or swimming at some point since it will be lighter on your body but still help you attain your goal of healthy living. It is about being mindful of the long game.

Ask yourself, what advice would I give my friend.  Another way to gain distance from the problem is to imagine that your friend told you the same dilemma, what would you tell them to do?  This approach can help because when you picture yourself not involved, those highly charged emotions reduce their intensity.  You can see the problem more clearly for what it is minus the strong feelings.  Andy Grove, the former Intel CEO had a similar technique he used, which was to ask the question, “If I were replaced tomorrow, what would my successor do”?

2. Run an experiment.  In Stumbling Upon Happiness, Daniel Gilbert asserts that when we are thinking about making a decision and factoring in our happiness, we tend to be pretty lousy at predicting what will make us happy.  We may think to ourselves, “once I move out of the city and to the suburbs, it will be quieter, I will not hear the ambulance sirens, trucks, and unrelenting construction disturbances.”  But when we do it, we realize it is boring, we do not like it, and in fact, those background noises provided the occasional rushes. So, the best thing to do is to conduct small experiments.  Spend weekends or months simulating how we would be living.  If moving also means a job change, testing the assumption while we have a paycheck is most helpful because we will have an exit plan.

3. Do a pre-mortem.  It is human nature to strategize an approach and formulate all the ways we will be successful, but few people talk about what could go wrong.  The pre-mortem considers what failure would look like before even beginning the project.  This approach could have come in handy during the British colonization of India when officials were concerned with the number of venomous cobra snakes in Delhi.  To solve the problem, the government gave cash for every dead cobra.  While the plan was initially successful, ultimately it was a failure because they did not think about all the entrepreneurs who got into the business of breeding snakes to generate additional income.  When the government scrapped the idea, the cobra breeders let the snakes loose, and the population blossomed.  The solution was worse than the problem, and with a proper pre-mortem, maybe this could have been prevented.  It could be helpful to invest in the upfront time to generate a list of the ways a solution can fail.  A good question to ask to kick off this inquiry is: If this decision was a debacle one week, one month, or one year from now, what would be the causes of the failure?

4. Take a break.  When we find ourselves mulling over a decision and we feel like we have expended all our energy, hit pause.   Either do something else you enjoy like going for a run or playing catch with your kids or simply allow yourself to be bored so you can review the problem in new ways.  Einstein turned to his violin whenever stuck.  Woody Allen changed rooms and took multiple showers.  Beethoven took hour-long strolls.  When you get distance from the problem and do something completely different, you broaden your focus.  Author Ron Friedman says, “It’s only then, when you have some distance, that loose connections suddenly appear, making creative insights more likely.”  Our brain continues to mull over unresolved problems, even when we turn our attention elsewhere, and we can bring that additional insight into making better decisions.

5. Time-box your decisions.  Once you have gathered your information, instead of waiting for the moons to align, give yourself a window of time to make up your mind and set a date because then you will be more motivated to act.  In an article in the Harvard Business Review, Mark Chussil, Founder of Advanced Competitive Strategies, recounts wise words from his friend who said, “you should not spend your life making up your mind because things change, values change, and dreams change.  What broke your heart or made your day at age 25 is inconsequential at age 45.”  If the issue on the table has been reasonably vetted and the choices are equally attractive, it is time to decide, take action, and break the impasse. That dreaded feeling of being stuck could be corroding other areas of your life and draining your energy.

6. Avoid decision fatigue by automating.  Some decisions are minor, like what to eat and what to wear.  Others are more difficult, like deciding between two job offers; if you should move to a new country for someone you love; if you should cut a toxic friend out of your life, even though you share a rich history.  With so many decisions taking up your day, when you can turn the small ones into a routine, you can save your mental resources for the complex decisions.  It is the reason why Steve Jobs wore black turtlenecks, and Mark Zuckerberg dons hoodies.  Both men have stated that these decisions are the simple result of daily routines intended to cut down on decision fatigue.  Barack Obama said, "You'll see I wear only gray or blue suits. I'm trying to pare down decisions. I don't want to make decisions about what I'm eating or wearing, because I have too many other decisions to make."  Routines can prime your mental state for the best decision-making.

7. Make one big decision at a time.  Some people try to make 2-3 decisions at once.  How about just making one, waiting, and then seeing how the landscape changes.  You do not need to solve everything before you take action.  Similar to riding a bike, it is easier to steer and make turns once you are moving.  We cannot plan life just from the sidelines; we need to participate and adjust on the go.  Is there one decision you can make that can be a lead domino for three others?

8. Make decisions in advance.  When you decide now how you will act in the future, you set yourself up for success.  For example, if you want to go for a run in the morning, you can lay out your clothes in advance and be mentally prepared to know that you are going first thing in the morning.  You do not have to think about it at the moment when you may be sleepy and unmotivated.  With advanced planning, you can even anticipate the fatigue that you may feel, and how you will overcome it.

9. Aim for 80% or a good enough choice.  Many things we can be deciding on could relate to wicked problems with changing requirements that are often hard to recognize and numerous unintended consequences. Even with all the best research and strategies, there will always be information that eludes us.  Steven Covey says that trying to be perfect prevents action.  If you feel about 80% confident in your decision, go for it.  Any difficult decision may not be ideal, but we can go for a good enough choice. Choices are made depending on the estimation of how things will be in the future, but the future is ever-changing so decisions made today can be based on faulty information. In that case, it could be helpful to choose a direction rather than a destination because you become open to the possibility of adjusting as you go to better match the realities you will be given.

10. Examine tradeoffs.  Ray Dalio, Author of Principles said, “I learned that if you work hard and creatively, you can have just about anything you want, but not everything you want.  Maturity is the ability to reject good alternatives to pursue even better ones.”  When faced with a choice between two things that you need and that are seemingly at odds, try and figure out how much of each you can get and know when you say no to one thing, you can say yes to another in which you are more enthusiastic.

11. Avoid indecision.  When we are in the deliberation stage, we have stress and anxiety, but when we move into phase two of pulling the trigger, our mind moves into action mode; it convinces us that the thing we have is better than the thing we left behind.  We sometimes wonder, after the fact, how we were even having a tough time deciding in the first place.  The energy you save by not deliberating pointlessly will be useful for other things, so put a timer on your decision and go for it.

Hard decisions are hard when we are in the process of making them, but after that, it is just life.  When we have systems in place to help us with decision-making, we can find ways to make the process a little less strenuous on ourselves, so we can spend more time in action with the things we love, and less time stuck in deciding.

Quote of the day: “[People are] born to live and not to prepare to live” - Boris Pasternak, Russian Poet

Q: What is your favorite system that you rely on for good decision-making? Comment and share below, we would love to hear from you!

[The next blog in this series 7/8 will focus on the aftermath of a decision.]

As a leadership development and executive coach, I work with leaders to help them make hard decisions, contact me to explore this topic further.

What’s your system for making decisions?

Top 10 Tips for Prioritization (Priority Series 5/5)

One of the biggest struggles in the modern workplace is knowing how to prioritize work.  Workloads are ballooning and everything feels important.  However, the truth is that a lot of the work we do every day does not really need to be done.  At least not right away.

Here are some additional helpful tips for tackling prioritization:

1. Apply the Pareto Principle or 80-20 rule to everything you do.  It says that 20% of your activities will account for 80% of your results.  So from a list of 10, two of those items will be worth the other eight combined.   On any given day, do you know your top two valued activities?  Spending 100% of your time on 20% of the activities will make a big difference.

2. Set Deadlines.  It is important to have deadlines for every task; otherwise, according to Parkinson’s Law, work will expand to fill the time available for its completion.  Coined by British scholar C. Northcote Parkinson, he points out that people usually take all the time allotted (and frequently more) to accomplish any task.  When you set an appropriate deadline, you can generally find ways to finish in that time frame. 

However, there might be times when you are unsure how long a task will take.  Do your best to plan and think on paper so you can give yourself a time range.  You can even build in extra time since you are not sure of the exact end time, and if you do not use it, you will be happy with the bonus time. Having an incentive to complete the task by the deadline and not infringe on your free time can be motivating.

3. Go From big to small.  It is good to start with a macro picture - what you want for the year - then go small by thinking about what you need to do today.  The smaller you get, the more energy you can devote to those items.  Mark Twain said, “the secret to getting ahead is getting started, the secret to getting started is breaking your complex, overwhelming tasks into small, manageable tasks and then starting on the first one.”  Each day, you can begin by asking – what is the one thing I can achieve today? 

4. Assess the value and estimated effort.  You can order your tasks by value.  There will always be some tasks that will have a much higher value.  For example, completing a client’s high-revenue project before doing internal work such as designing a presentation template for yourself for the next time you give a speech. Ask yourself how many people would be impacted by your completed work.  The more people involved, the higher the stakes.  

You can also order tasks by estimated effort.  If you have competing items that are equal in value, you can further divide them by the estimated time of completion.  Generally, productivity experts usually suggest the tactic of starting on the lengthier task first.  However, if your style is to complete a series of smaller tasks to free up the mental energy to dedicate all your power to the bigger tasks, you can choose the process that best supports your style.  It can also be motivating to check off a few things from your list before moving on to the weightier items.

5. Be flexible and adaptable.  Uncertainty and change are givens.  Know that your priorities will change, and often when you least expect them.  Since we cannot know the future, new information can force us to tweak our plans.  While that is true that you want to stay focused on the tasks that are important to you, you also want to be aware of the sunk cost fallacy.  In this psychological effect, we feel compelled to continue doing something just because we have already put time and effort into it.  Spending time on the wrong items that will not move the needle will be detrimental in the long run because you will never get that time back.  Life can remind us that there will be times when we have to stop what we are doing and switch tactics to get back on a better and faster track.  Bestselling Author Jim Collins reminds us that a “stop-doing list” is even more important than a to-do list.  We simply cannot do it all, even though we all know many people who try.

What’s your favorite tip for prioritization?

6. Make a decision on priorities.  A big problem that some leaders have is that they do not make any decisions, thereby failing to signal to others what is truly important.  This lack of prioritization is a problem.  Steve Jobs said, “what I don't do, is just as important as what I do.”  Take a couple of minutes in the morning to set your intentions to get what you want from the day instead of somebody else setting your agenda.

A. Actively choose what not to do.  Warren Buffet decided that he would invest only in the business that was absolutely sure of and then bet heavily on them.  He owes 90% of his wealth to just 10 investments.  All the decisions he made not to invest are just as important as deciding on what to invest.  He said, “for every 100 great opportunities that are brought to me, I say no to 99 of them.”  To be one of the best investors of all time, you need to be selective.  So, when in doubt, cut!

B. Choose One.  Having one significant priority will help to add structure in your life.  In the early 2010s, Mark Zuckerberg had a single focus to grow Facebook.  So anytime somebody went to him to pitch an idea, he would respond, “does it help us grow?”  Even if the answers were attractive such as this will make a lot of money or this will help the business, he would ask the same question about growth until he got the answer he wanted.  He had a main goal to focus on growth and made it very clear to all his employees so they were able to filter their requests first before going to him because they knew clearly what he cared about; they knew about his main objective of growth.  He only wanted to discuss one initiative at a time and refused to talk about anything else. 

Similarly, Billionaire Peter Thiel gave everybody one objective to focus on and when his employees wanted to have a meeting with Peter to pitch a new idea, he would ask how the new idea impacted that goal.  They had to connect all their work to that one priority.

C. Choose the “Hell Yes” option or it is a No.  The things that yield a “hell yes” response should get priority.  Derek Sivers uses this approach when making a decision, he only says yes to the things that he is really excited about.  Everything else, including the lukewarm commitments are a no.  So, if you think of activities on a scale from 1-10 (10 being really excited), the activities with a ranking of a 10  would be an easy yes, and any task from 1-9 would be a hard No. Check out my blog on Saying Yes for more.

D. Go for quality over quantity.  You do not have to do 100 things, you just have to do a few things right.  Get clear on your first principles, which are the things you love.  Distinguishing between the trivial many and the vital few is important.  Greg McKewon defines being an essentialist as “the relentless pursuit of less but better.”  Cross something off of your to-do list by not doing it and feel the relief.  

7. Get comfortable saying No.  Once you know your top goals, you want to say no to time killers and non-aligned requests.  Saying no does not mean a rejection of the person, but a way to honor your own commitments to yourself.  You can say, “This is something that I would love to help with and I’m grateful for the opportunity, but I need to focus on other pressing commitments right now.  The good news is I have already lined up a great replacement.” 

The script can be written in many different ways, the important piece of information is that there are a multitude of ways to say no politely, while also protecting your most important time.  Feel free to check out my earlier blog on Saying No which contains more scripts. 

8. Get comfortable with tradeoffs.  In making priorities, you have to make tradeoffs.  When you say no, it means you get to say yes to something else. Herb Kelleher, CEO of Southwest Airlines, always made these strategic tradeoffs.  He treated every “no” as a yes for his company.  Saying no to one thing allowed him to say yes to something else, such as developing an amazing company culture.  These tradeoffs were not made by default, but by design!  Herb said in an interview, “You have to look at every opportunity and say, well, no … I’m sorry.  We’re not going to do a thousand different things that really don’t contribute much to the end result we are trying to achieve.”  He made Southwest the dominant airline because he said no to destinations that were not point to point, no to serving meals, and no to first-class because they would have all been at the expense of offering cheap seats, which was his main priority.

It is important to be clear in your priorities because if two conflict, you want to know exactly what to do.  For example –being called into the office to work on a project and having a family event to go to, you can decide in advance what you are going to do based on what’s most important to you.  This way, when the decision comes up, it is not as difficult since you already did the advanced decision-making.  

9. Stick to your agreements and beware of boundary creep.  Let’s say you and your boss have agreed that your main priority is to build the website so all other aspects would be taken off your plate.  The beginning of the agreement feels great because you finally have the time for a single focus and you are making significant progress.  Then, a few months later, you notice that additional work keeps creeping in so your normal workload is the way it used to be before the discussion.  When that happens, be sure to correct it immediately.  Your priorities will always be tested, but when you are crystal clear with your boundaries, you can prevent any additional work encroachment.

10.  Choose an outbox over an inbox strategy.  How easy is it for us to lose precious hours of our day swallowed up by emails, wondering where the time went and why we did not accomplish anything? Living with an inbox strategy means that we respond to every request and interruption, we are at the mercy of other people‘s needs and agendas. In contrast, living with an outbox strategy means taking control of our day by setting clear and focused goals and then following that roadmap to get the job done.  Successful leaders know how to get clear on the essentials. 

Prioritization is a necessary skill to learn because sometimes it can feel like information is coming at us like a hose that has no off switch.  The approach of keeping up with the amount of data coming our way is a full-proof fail strategy.  Instead, we have to find ways to be selective in how much we are going to accept, when we will receive it, and how we can discard the excess. 

Quotes of the day: “ It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”  -J. K. Rowling

“Theory is good for the intellect, action is good for the soul” - Robert Reiner 

Q: What is your favorite prioritization tip?  Comment and share with us, we would love to hear what works for you! 

As an Executive and Leadership Coach, I partner with people who want to get clarity on their priorities, contact me to learn more.

Why you need a daily practice of planning and prioritization (Priority Series 3/5)

The last blog covered the importance of mapping out our high-level plan, including our purpose, vision, and values.  Now we can jump into creating a daily practice of planning and prioritizing.

Author and Organizational Consultant David Allen, a master of prioritization and planning, offers his Getting Things Done (GTD) system for organization.  His 5-step process - capture, clarify, organize, reflect, and engage with your stuff - helps us get more precise with our work.

1. Capture.  We need different lists for different purposes.  First, make a master list, where you capture everything you need to do in one spot that is out of your mind.  This thought-download exercise will provide a sense of relief.  Allen asserts, “Your mind is for having ideas, not for holding them.”  If we put things in an external drive, we can free up mental space and be fully engaged with our current tasks and be more present with the people in our lives.  You can create categories of things that are important to you for more significant organization.  You can also have a “someday maybe” list of items that could be interesting to explore eventually.  For example, consider taking the marketing course, look into taking the family to this event.  You can then further divide your work into monthly, weekly, and daily lists.  Don’t worry about the number of items, just get as much down on the paper as possible. 

2. Clarify.  Get clear on all the things you have to do.  Break down your big items into parts.  Instead of having the task of “write a blog,” you can split it into its components parts such as: 1. Create an outline 2. Research 3. Write the first draft  4. Proofread 5. Post.  It seems like a small simple action, but it makes a big difference if it means that you are more likely to start when you know all you have to do is jot down an outline instead of doing all those prerequisite steps for publication.

3. Organize.  You can arrange your actionable items by category, priority, and due date.  As productivity consultant Brian Tracy explains, your monthly list pulls from your master list. Your weekly list pulls from your monthly list.  And so on.  This way, you know your daily priorities align with your bigger goals. 

When completing your different lists, remember the Pareto Principle, that 20% of your efforts tend to produce 80% of your results.  Look for those tasks that bring you great gains.

4. Reflect.  Reflect on your to-do list.  Allen recommends doing this weekly and performing general clean up.  It is a time to see how your week went, what needs to be adjusted, and what needs to happen for the week ahead. This airplane view will allow you to see if your priorities are aligning with your purpose, vision, and goals and if they are not, you can choose to delegate, cancel, or reschedule some of your non-essential tasks.

5. Engage.  Take action – choose your next task from your list and get it done.  If you find that you are stalling, break up the task, maybe the next step is to have a couple of conversations with others to get ideas on how to proceed. Once you take the next step, you can receive additional information that you can act upon for the following step, and so on.

While you are planning, it is essential to be flexible.  What you want today can be different from what you want in the future, so you need to occasionally check in with yourself to make sure your values and goals are crystal clear and current.  Reshuffling priorities and making changes are all part of the process.

The very act of thinking and planning unlocks your mental powers and triggers your creativity.  Choose a process that will allow you to take action on the work that matters most to you.

Quote of the day:  “Cleaning and organizing is a practice, not a project” -Meagan Francis

Q: Which method do you use for organizing your information?  Comment and share with us, we would love to hear from you!

[The next blog in this series 4/5 will focus on systems of prioritization]

As a Leadership Coach, I partner with others to get clarity on their priorities, contact me to learn more.

Establish a daily practice to enhance your prioritization skills

The Importance of Long-Term Planning Before you Prioritize (Priority Series 2/5)

You have just decided that you are going to start regularly prioritizing so you can go big on the things that matter to you. To facilitate your efforts, you first want to devise an effective planning system that will offer greater strategic clarity.

Here are some useful steps to take to create a foundation of planning that will set you up for more effective prioritization: 

Get clear on WHAT you want and WHY you want it! This process includes purpose, values, vision, goals, and objectives.

1. Purpose.  This can be a much more involved exercise, but essentially, why are you on this planet, what are you here to do?  Is your purpose to help others, if so, what actions are you taking to serve that purpose which allows you to feel fully alive?  It will be easier for you to create daily and weekly tasks when you know what you need to do within the bigger picture and when you are going after purpose-driven items, you will love the reasons for choosing what to spend time on.

2. Values.  These are essential pillars that energize you and buttress your purpose.  Maybe your values include learning and service, so having a purpose aimed at helping others seems natural. When you are living your values, you will feel productive in how you spend your moments.

3. Vision.  Three or five years from now, where do you want to be?  If you fulfilled your purpose, what would that look like, what would your lifestyle be?  Paint a detailed picture.; you need to know where you want to go so you can take prioritization steps to support that vision.

4. Set goals and objectives.  Once you have your vision, you want to collect all the things you need to do to accomplish that 3-year plan and capture it on one master list.  Then you can break it down into yearly, monthly, weekly, and daily goals and objectives.  Prioritization happens on different levels. You have the tasks that need to be done today, goals completed in a week, and accomplishments for the month.  Sometimes the lists do not always align, and sometimes it can be easy to default to what seems urgent today instead of what is vital for the long term.  Always choose to take the steps that are moving you closer to your important life priorities – your purpose and vision.

This high-level planning will make daily decisions much easier.  Brian Tracy’s 10-90 rule for personal effectiveness says that when you spend 10% of the time planning,  you save up to 90% of your time in execution.

You may also want to consider this popular ABZ planning method in designing your long-term objectives.  Created by Authors and Co-founders Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha, it is an excellent strategy for designing your career while being flexible and having a backup plan for when things go wrong.  Plan A is about your current focus, which can be modified to adapt to small changes.  In case of a dramatic or unexpected change, Plan B launches, allowing you to pivot to refocus your goals and take the next steps to get there.  Plan Z is the fallback position; if all goes wrong, it is something you can comfortably rely on while you get back on your feet and not have to worry about the basics.

When you are clear about what you want and your priorities, you should be able to act decisively when a conflict comes up.  To help with this decision-making, you can set up potential conflict scenarios.  For example, you say that you want to prioritize career advancement.  So if you have an amazing work opportunity come up, but it is on the same day as your friend’s birthday party, which activity will you choose to attend?  When you put a few of these conflicts against each other and know exactly how you will act based on your vision, values, and purpose, you will be less stressed and act with conviction when the time comes.

To begin to prioritize, you want to get clear on your big-picture items – purpose, values, vision, goals, and objectives.  Then you can jump into the daily actions of working from a list and prioritize your most important work.

Quote of the day: “Tell me, what is it you wish to do with your one wild and precious life?” -Mary Oliver

Q: When was the last time you dedicated time to think and write about your purpose?  Comment and share with us, we would love to hear from you 

[The next blog in this series 3/5 will focus on daily practices of prioritization] 

As a Leadership Coach, I partner with others to craft their personal leadership vision, contact me to learn more.

Big-picture planning will make your priorities clearer

Never Arrive Late Again With This Easy Hack

Even with generating anxious and unpleasant feelings for all parties involved, lateness is an occurrence that has plagued the best of us time and time again. So why does it happen and what can we do about it? In 1979, renowned economist Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky proposed the Planning Fallacy.  It states that people are lousy at figuring out how much time they will take to complete something because they overestimate their abilities and underestimate the degree to which they are estimating, since they think they can do more than they actually can.

Say for instance, you were supposed to meet a friend at 2pm downtown.  Since it only takes 40 minutes to get there, you calculate a 1:20pm departure to arrive in the nick of time, right? Well, let’s examine that logic a bit closer.  Here are some of the assumptions you may have made in your decision: a) you will get dressed in time and out the door by said time, b) the trains are running smoothly and you make your transfer, c) there will be no amazing subway entertainers who distract you resulting in missing your stop and d) you will be able to walk the 3 blocks with no foot traffic from the congested streets, and avoid the myriad of other random popups. 

Here are some strategies to overcome the planning fallacy:

1. Add 50% Additional Time. The trick is to remain cognizant of the potential to be late while planning for the worst-case scenario; then, the probability of being late immediately begins to dwindle. So, go ahead and assume that you may not be able to find that coveted shirt that you had been wanting to wear or that the trains are going to be slow. Just by adding 50% extra time to your original estimate; in this case - aiming to leave at 1:00pm instead of 1:20pm will significantly improve your punctuality.

The same challenges arise with intellectual tasks as people are not good at estimating how long it will take to get something done because of an optimism bias. You may think, of course, I can complete the book by the end of the year; after all, I am smart and capable and will get it done.  Unfortunately, people are often really poor judges of their abilities.  A good way to address this is to gather more information, which in turn allows for better planning.  Getting an outside perspective to see how long it will actually take can be helpful.  That may include talking to a published author so you can learn about all of the smaller steps in the book writing process that you may not know of or you may have overlooked. 

When Danielle Kahneman was planning on collaborating with other professors to write a textbook on morals for his university, he thought it would have been completed in about two years; but the Dean, who had seen so many professors in his position before, said it would be more like 3-5 years.  In his experience, about 40% of professors who started a massive collaborative project similar to this one did not finish.  Indeed, the Dean was right as it ended up taking them much longer to complete because they based their timeline on the best-case scenario and did not factor in the general vicissitudes of life including divorce, death, and bureaucratic obstacles that slowed the work of the team.

2. Add a buffer for the unknown. We absolutely cannot plan for every scenario, but a good way to reduce stress is to create an additional allowance for unexpected events that can potentially put a wrinkle in our schedules. 

3. Use the 10/90 Rule. Another way to be a more effective planner would be to invoke what Brian Tracy dubbed the 10/90 Rule for personal effectiveness.  He notes that when you spend 10% of your time planning and organizing your work before you begin, you will save 90% of the time in getting the job done once you get started.  Lots of good things happen when you think on paper. 

These three strategies - a) adding 50% additional time, b) creating space for the unknown, c) and utilizing the 10/90 rule can help in combating the planning fallacy.

Q: What are your favorite hacks to achieve punctuality in your work?

Quote of the day: "Amateurs talk about strategy, professionals talk about logistics."  -General Omar Bradley

Anticipate and Avoid the Planning Fallacy