Chapter 22.
Know Your Purpose

There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.

—Peter F. Drucker

It is hard to motivate others if you don’t have time to talk to them. There are fewer discouraging sights than a human chicken running around with his head cut off—and not enough time to find it.

Managers whose teams are not performing up to expectations are simply doing ineffective things all day. Rather than stopping and deciding what would be the right thing to do, they do the wrong things faster and faster. Then they stress out over the “workload.” (There is no “workload” to worry about if you are doing the right thing. There is only that thing.)

And as corporate time-management specialist David Allen says of today’s busy leaders: “You have more to do than you can possibly do. You just need to feel good about your choices.”

Multitasking is the greatest myth in modern-day business. The thinking part of the brain itself does not multitask, and so people do not really multitask. The human system is not set up that way. The brain experiences and holds only one thought at a time.

Managers often think they are multitasking, but they are really just doing one thing badly and then quickly moving to another thing, doing it badly and quickly. Soon they’re preoccupied with all the tasks they’ve touched but left incomplete.

Business efficiency expert Kerry Gleeson said, “The constant, unproductive preoccupation with all the things we have to do is the single largest consumer of time and energy.” Not the things we do, the things we think we still have to do.

People who find the joy in leadership find ways to relax into an extremely purposeful day, goal-oriented and focused on the highest-priority activity. They relax into every given moment. Sure they get distracted, and sure, people call them and “problems” come up. But they know what to return to. Because they know their purpose. Because they chose it.

That’s the kind of leader that is admired and followed.