CHAPTER 5
PRACTICE 3: UNLEASH PRODUCTIVITY
THE GREAT ARCHIMEDES (287–212 B.C.), one of the world’s finest mathematicians, was a man before his time. Not only did he pioneer the techniques of what became integral calculus and figure the approximate value of π (pi), but he is also said to be the father of the machine age by discovering and putting to use the properties of levers and pulleys.
In a letter to his friend, King Hieron II of Syracuse, Archimedes said, “Give me a place to stand and I will move the world.” The king took him up on this claim and had the largest merchant ship of the age, the Syracusia, deliberately beached by a team of thousands of men and horses and fully loaded with cargo. For days they struggled and strained to ground the giant vessel. Then the king challenged Archimedes to move the ship back into the water by himself.
The story goes that Archimedes attached to the ship a complex machine made of levers and pulleys and, sitting at some distance from the port, gently pulled a rope through the machine. To the amazement of the king, the ship moved in a straight line back into the water. By applying the principle of leverage, Archimedes alone did the work of thousands of men.
Given enough support, any human being has virtually limitless power. Each person in your organization is unique and has an irreplaceable set of gifts, talents, skills, and passions that cannot be found anywhere else. Too many leaders labor under the pernicious paradigm that people are interchangeable, that one worker equals another, that they can easily replace one person with another person. They see a person as an asset, like a computer or a tractor or a robot, easily traded on the market.
It’s common in business to speak of people as assets (although they’re considered expenses on the income statement), and leaders often toss out the dull cliché that “our people are our most important assets.” But people are not assets. An asset is something you own—a human being cannot be owned, bought, sold, traded, swapped, exchanged, or returned like a machine.
Too many leaders treat people like machines. You can buy a car, fuel it, wash it occasionally, and take it in once a year for scheduled maintenance to keep it running without much thought. If something goes wrong, you can get it fixed or trade it in for a new one. Often leaders do the same with people: They buy a worker, pay her, and bring her in once a year for a performance review to make sure she is “doing what it takes” to achieve the organization’s productivity goals. If something goes wrong, they get her fixed (send her over to HR) or trade her in for a new one. The leader shakes her head, wondering why that employee is not as excited or motivated as she to give a little “extra effort.”
The old industrial paradigm that an employee is an interchangeable cog in the machine is the most important reason why people are disengaged in the workplace, refusing to give the “extra effort.” That’s why the most important job to be done now is to replace that paradigm with a new paradigm: that every person is uniquely powerful. Your job as a leader is to unleash that power.
For years now, the mantra of leaders has been “Do more with less”—cut costs, leverage assets, maximize efficiencies—and it’s a good paradigm, as everyone knows. The problem is, it isn’t sufficient anymore. Some leaders even use that mantra to abuse people, loading more and more work on them without giving them the right kind of support. More often, leaders simply don’t understand the principle of leverage. Remember Archimedes: One person has virtually limitless power, given the right mindset, the right tools, and the right place to stand.
| THE JOB USED TO BE . . . | THE JOB THAT YOU MUST DO NOW . . . |
| Do more with less | Unleash and engage people to do infinitely more than you imagined they could. |
The new mantra is this: “Unleash people and they will choose to do infinitely more than you ever imagined they could.”
In the Industrial Age we leashed people to the ship as Hieron did and instructed them to drag it. It was hard work, but they did it. Today, if you’re mentally still stuck with that mindset, you have fewer people leashed to the ship, and you’re piling on cargo (“more with less”), so they’re getting burned out instead of fired up, exhausted instead of energized. This is not the way to engage them.
The “more with less” trend was going on long before the financial crisis of the twenty-first century, which made things substantially worse. The workforce shrank even further, and those left behind have been taking on more and more excessive workloads, putting real strain on family life and social relationships.
The result is that a third of Americans are now experiencing chronic work stress.1 According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, only 13 percent of Americans in middle age are healthier than their parents were at the same age; doctors say “chronic stress” is the number one reason.2 And it’s not just the older workers who suffer. A vast number of professionals are burning out in their thirties. It’s particularly tough for women who have to deal with the “double shift” of work and motherhood.3
The problem of burnout is worldwide. In Britain, work-related mental health conditions such as stress, depression, and anxiety cost UK employers about £28.3 billion a year.4 In India’s fast-growing tech sector, “exhaustion and cynicism have increased”5 and “stress is becoming a huge deterrent to productivity.”6 In Japan, ten thousand working people die each year from karoshi, the Japanese term for “death from overwork.”7
There comes a point where fewer workers trying to do too much simply can’t drag the ship any farther, and we seem to be coming to that point. McKinsey & Company has concluded that global productivity is stalling precisely because of an underdeveloped, unleveraged workforce: “To eke out even modest GDP increases, OECD nations must achieve nothing short of Herculean gains in productivity. In the 1970s, the United States could rely on a growing labor force to generate 80 cents of every $1 gain in GDP. During the coming decade … that ratio will invert: labor force gains will contribute less than 30 cents to each additional dollar of economic growth … The challenge is even greater in Western Europe, where no growth in the workforce is expected … And in Japan, the hurdle is higher still.”8
That’s why your main competitive advantage going forward will be your ability to unleash the latent productivity of people.
UNLEASHING THE POWER OF PEOPLE
Scientists tell us there is enough nuclear energy in a few buckets of seawater to power the entire world for a day—if it could be unleashed. Likewise, there’s enough talent, intelligence, capability, and creativity in each of the people in your organization to astound you—if it could be unleashed. Stephen R. Covey said, “Imagine the personal and organizational cost of failing to fully engage the passion, talent, and intelligence of the workforce. It is far greater than you can possibly imagine.”
In the Industrial Age, money was the key motivator. Now, financial incentives fall short of engaging people. Salary is a “hygiene factor”—it’s expected. So what does motivate them? A monumental Towers Perrin study showed that knowing their contribution is valued means far more to workers than their salary does. No other motivational factor—money, opportunity, trust, or communication—counts as much as appreciation.9 Knowing that your contribution is meaningful matters more than anything else.
“The least of things with meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it,” said Carl Jung. Almost every worker feels this way, as scholars recently found when surveying people across generations. It doesn’t much matter how old we are or the kind of work we do. “We all want the same basic things out of work,” concludes Wharton Professor Adam Grant. “Whether we’re Boomers, Gen Xers, or Millennials, we’re searching for interesting, meaningful jobs that challenge and stretch us.”10
Meaning is the key to engaging people. It’s more important than money. It’s even more important than happiness. For instance, in describing new research by Barbara Frederickson and her colleagues on two types of happiness—euidaimonic and hedonic—Nature World News noted that “even on a molecular level, the human body is able to distinguish between a sense of well-being derived from a profound, ‘noble’ purpose versus simple self-gratification.”11 Too much “feel-good living” (hedonic) seems to increase inflammation, raise stress levels, and weaken the immune system, whereas “meaningful living” (eudaimonic) is associated with better immune responses and capacity to handle adversity.12 Meaning is good for you. It’s also good for the organization you work for—the more people find their work meaningless, the worse it is for the business.
Some will say, “It’s my job to pay them. It’s their job to find meaning in what they do.” They have the old organizational mindset that Daniel Pink has described: “Humans by their nature seek purpose—to make a contribution and to be part of a cause greater and more enduring than themselves. But traditional businesses have long considered purpose ornamental—a perfectly nice accessory, so long as it didn’t get in the way of the important things.”13
The other vitally important component to unleashing a person’s power is a sense of accomplishment. A person can know his purpose and be passionate about it, but in today’s world of “do more with less,” where employees are more accessible (thanks to technology) and thus are buried by demands, crises, matrixed teams, and more, he may be left wondering why, at the end of each day, he was so busy but felt so unaccomplished.
Think about your organization. Have you developed a culture of “busy”? Is your culture one where the award goes to the person who stayed latest at night versus the one who executed perfectly on a key project or goal and still left at a reasonable hour? Have you created a culture of “reward for rescue at the eleventh hour,” instead of reward for a great root cause analysis that removed a chronic issue and unleashed millions to the bottom line? Have you provided the processes and methods that allow high-impact projects to get completed on time and with high quality, reducing both redundancy and re-work? Have you equipped your people with the communication skills to powerfully and precisely inform and persuade others to action to reduce the disease of unproductive meetings?
Nobody wants to be buried under a load of meaningless busy work, then have to push through to the voluminous number of deadlines to hit. If the work isn’t engaging people, and they are not equipped with the tools to execute with excellence, you need to back up and think seriously about how you expect your people to execute on their best efforts in the Knowledge Worker Age. Your people’s greatest assets are their brains, no longer just the hands and backs that the Industrial Age required. We are well out of the Industrial Age, and it’s time more leaders come to terms with this. As Peter Drucker said, “The most important contribution management needs to make in the twenty-first century is similarly to increase the productivity of knowledge work and the knowledge worker.”14 So what are the root problems for the knowledge workers of the twenty-first century?
Productivity Choice
TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY PRODUCTIVITY BARRIERS
FranklinCovey has been the leader in time management for many years. We’ve trained more than 25 million people and enabled that learning with our famous Franklin Planner tools. We’ve helped people manage “time,” but today’s productivity problems go far deeper than just managing units of time. The Knowledge Worker Age has a few specific challenges that allow the time to just “go by,” which can leave us feeling unaccomplished and weary at the end of a day.
Productivity Problem 1: We’re Making More Decisions than Ever
Think about it: Every email, demand, request, phone call, and idea is a decision your brain is required to make. During the Industrial Age, workers on an assembly line put one part on one machine a hundred times a day. They had few choices and fewer decisions to make. Decisions they did have to make were simple and of low value. Their tools had one, straightforward use.
As knowledge workers, we no longer stand in an assembly line doing repetitive tasks. We have comparatively unlimited decisions coming at us about what to work on, when, and how (“Do I answer this email? Accept this meeting invitation? Work on this project or that one?”). We do our best to handle decisions as they come in, but the decisions we are required to make are complex and have high value. For example, a salesperson’s decisions on how to use her time can mean millions in revenue. We might be constantly busy, but still ask ourselves at the end of the day, “What the heck did I get done?”
One of our clients told us that her sales organization was overrun with emails, fires to put out, and other demands. They were just too, too busy. When asked what the most important activities were for driving sales, she explained that demonstrations led to the greatest closing rate. Yet even though her teams were fully aware of this, they were so “busy” that those demonstrations were not being chosen as the high-priority activities.
Productivity Problem 2: Our Attention Is Under Unprecedented Attack
The dings, pings, beeps, and buzzes each represent a demand and seem to come at us from everywhere. Thanks to technology, the information explosion is huge, but it is almost incomprehensible how huge. By the end of the twentieth century, the entire sum of information produced since the dawn of civilization was about twelve exabytes, or 10 bytes. We now produce this much information in about four days! And that does not include our personal information. We are all in serious danger of drowning in emails, texts, and tweets! The fact that our brain loves the novelty of those dings and pings, which creates an addiction to technology, doesn’t help. Thus the paradox: Technology makes our lives easier, more effective, and more efficient, but it also distracts us and overburdens us because the unstoppable flow of information is out of control.
Productivity Problem 3: We Suffer from a Personal Energy Crisis
Problems 1 and 2 are wearing us out. We no longer work a standard eight-hour day. Our minds are constantly churning, trying to make high-value decisions, virtually twenty-four hours day. Our mode of life today—constant stress, poor diet, and lack of exercise and sleep—leads to what scientists call “exhaustion syndrome.” The rest of us call it burnout. We continually push through each day, postponing the renewal time our bodies and brains need. The mantra is “work like crazy and then crash.” And, as we mentioned, we get rewarded for this mindset; it becomes a badge of honor to brag about, “Our team was up till midnight.” Do your employees receive emails and texts from you at 10 p.m.? Chances are they are stressed over not knowing whether or not they should be answering them. Are they supposed to “work” at that hour? Do they know what you expect?
Some leaders will shrug these problems off, saying, “This is just the world we have to live in. Deal with it.” Other leaders—highly effective leaders—will realize the costs of this and take action.
In an ongoing FranklinCovey survey of more than 350,000 people of all organizational levels from around the world, respondents reported that they felt they were wasting 40 percent of their time.15 That’s almost half their time!
These vast losses don’t blatantly show up as expenses on the P&L or as a liability on the balance sheet, yet they are global and pervasive. And most important? Wasting half your time is completely disengaging.
The more you manage these three problems, the more extraordinary you and your teams will be. If we ignore the fact that it is no longer just about “time management,” your workforce will continue to feel unaccomplished, feel like they don’t serve a purpose, and disengage.
But imagine if they did feel accomplished, they did enjoy coming to work, and knew that every day they were making a great contribution? What would it mean if your teams measurably reported they felt they were working on important things 80 percent or 90 percent of the time instead of 60 percent? What would it mean if most of their time was productive?
How do we capture what a person’s mind and heart can produce? By equipping them with twenty-first-century mindsets, skillsets, and toolsets that assist them in feeling highly accomplished every day.
High productivity and team engagement start with you. Are you modeling the right productivity behaviors? Are you intentionally sorting through all the incoming stuff, making the highest-value decisions every day? Are you conscious of how many decisions—with varying levels of urgency—you ask your people to make every day that may cause overload? Do you realize that your people tend to assume you need everything right now?
Are you conscious of how you use your technology, making sure you rule your technology versus letting it rule you? The greatest way to disengage employees is to peek at your smartphone when they come to you asking you for help or just during a casual conversation. Your brain can only do one thing well at a time; if it is trying to process smartphone information, there is no way you can hear or connect with the person trying to get your attention. And if that is your behavior, you have trained your team to do the same.
Are you known as the “inhuman” who works practically twentyfour hours a day with no breaks? Is this a badge of honor? Studies show that pausing, resting, and sleeping increase productivity by 35%. Modeling this behavior is critical. Once your people see you mastering the art of making the highest-value decisions, staying focused on the humans instead of just the technology, and taking care of your (and their) mental and physical energy, the faster everyone will expand their contribution.
One of our clients needed to make sure their seven hundred sales reps were at peak performance. The leadership team saw that everyone appeared busy, but realized that the sales reps were doing way too much “other” work, and might not be optimizing their sales. They also believed there was a high level of disillusionment and disengagement. After partnering with us, they were elated with the results they achieved. They told us that people are now speaking the same language around “importance and urgency.” The team has a clear and consistent vision of success in both their personal and professional roles, and they are beginning to practice work/life balance. Individuals are also doing a great job implementing technology tools for smoother and more efficient workflow. Last, they continue to focus on wellness and brain health to optimize their performance in each of their identified key roles.
A vice president at another firm shared that he was able to eliminate six hours of meetings each week. Imagine his delight in recapturing that time—and imagine the delight and engagement of his team when they reclaimed that time!
We were pleased to receive this insight from Stephanie, a new, twenty-four-year-old elementary school teacher, that she had gained about her contribution in life: “As a new teacher, I had a parent tell me that her son was a better person for having known me. Those words had a significant impact on me. I realized that I don’t have to be well-known to make a difference. A contribution of this sort cannot be measured in the way the world measures success, but the effects are never-ending. I want to leave that legacy.”
You engage individuals by helping them discover the contribution they want to make in their roles. We each have one or more roles to play in the organization’s success. Some people sell, some design products, some do marketing, some process or analyze data and financials—some are on matrixed teams, some are mentors or coaches. But we should not be our job descriptions, whether at work or even at home. It is not so much what we do, but the reason behind what we do that motivates us. We create the vision of success for our roles.
What roles do you play? What is your vision of success in your roles? When you determine this, you will rediscover passion and purpose. So will your people. When they discover and write down the purpose in their role (i.e., what they want to be known for in their role), they are identifying the burning contribution they would love to make.
In this way, you get a clear sense of who these people are, what their gifts are, and their philosophies about their work. People are full of passion and realism, and you need to help identify and unleash the power of volunteered productivity from your team.
Take a minute to think about your leadership role. Write a statement that describes the contribution you want to make. Don’t just describe what you do now; write down what you want to do in your leadership role. In this way you’ll tap into your own passion, discovering what really motivates you and how you can create a better world around you.
W. H. Murray, organizer of the 1951 Scottish Himalayan expedition, wrote: “Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness concerning all acts of initiative and creation. There is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans; that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen events, meetings and material assistance which no one could have dreamed would have come their way.”16
It is amazing what happens when you pause from the “busyness” for a moment, reach inside, find your purpose, and make a commitment to your role statement. When your purpose is combined with determined action, you create a sense of momentum that is hard to stop. This is what it means to live by design rather than by default. When people know the vision for success in their roles, it accelerates high value-decision management and focused attention.
You can help others discover their contribution by having this conversation with them:
“Imagine meeting yourself when you leave your current role, whether it’s weeks, months, or years from now. Who are you? What contributions have you made? How do you know? Have you made a real difference to the organization? To our clients? How would you define and measure that difference?
“Have you given the best that’s in you? Have you brought your best talents, gifts, and creativity to the role? In what ways? Have you felt yourself stretching, growing, learning? How have you grown? What is the most important thing you’ve learned?”
As people contemplate these questions, they go deep into themselves. They tap into what invigorates them, what is the root of their passion, and both the leader and team member learn how to engage the individual. If you challenge your people in this way, you will be the rarest of leaders—the one who knows how to release the tremendous inner power of your people.
And you will be rare. The Economist noted in 2006 that, according to McKinsey & Company, “despite the dramatic changes in the way people work, the organizations in which they carry out that work have changed much less than might be expected.” It added, quoting McKinsey, that “today’s big companies do very little to enhance the productivity of their professionals.”17 In other words, twenty-first-century organizations are not fit for twenty-first-century workers.
TAPPING UNTOLD ENERGIES
Be the rare leader who turns this situation around. Contemplate the energy, vitality, and optimism of people who are deeply engaged, particularly in this era when our technology leaves us breathless. We are at the edge of the greatest of times. Former San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom has this insight: “The reality is, people will build cool things for the sake of building cool things. They will expend countless hours and untold energy for the sake of creating something useful or even just fun. There’s an excitement out there, a hunger to try new things, to explore the limits of what all these new technologies can do.”18
But we can still see you shaking your head, saying, “There’s so much apathy out there. People have been knocked around and messed with and worked to the bone. I don’t know if they would have the energy to ‘engage’ even if they wanted to.” They’ve been dragging the ship through the mud for so long that their souls are burned out.
“Apathy doesn’t actually exist,” says Canadian startup genius Dave Meslin. “People do care, but we live in a world that actively discourages engagement by constantly putting obstacles in our way.
“We’re missing the most important characteristic of leadership, which is that it comes from within, it means following your own dreams uninvited, and then working with others to make your dreams come true. Companies are so uninspiring and uncreative, feeding cynicism at the expense of bold and creative ideas. Of course people are apathetic. It’s like running into a brick wall.”19
The following example illustrates the impact that can come from tapping into passions, even in the face of daunting obstacles. Karen and Bob Hahne were in their forties, with a house full of young children, when they received a call at home one evening. Karen happened to answer the phone. It was social services. The Hahnes had adopted three children years before, so it wasn’t entirely unusual to receive a call from social services. The caller told her they had just learned of a baby boy who needed a home; would Karen be interested in adopting another child? “This child was born with Down syndrome. He will have many special challenges and will require unique care,” they said.
So the Hahnes started a new adventure with their new son, Reed. Something about him engaged their souls and ignited a fierce outpouring of energy.
As anticipated, Reed presented many challenges. The professionals told them to “love him, but don’t expect too much.” Others advised to keep Reed out of the school system. He would be figuratively crucified, they were told. Another concerned individual asked them, “How can you do this to your other children?” Their response: “How can we not give them this wonderful opportunity to learn and grow?”
Over the next few years, the Hahnes worked with Reed. As expected, his development was delayed, but progress began and Reed gradually responded to their care. They exposed him to fine music, the theater, and other culturally rich and stimulating experiences. Reed learned to talk, exuding enthusiasm for life. The Hahnes continued to explore every possibility for helping Reed grow in his capabilities. They pursued government and community initiatives, only to learn there were few options. But they decided not to sit and fret about it. Learning of other parents of children with Down syndrome who also struggled for resources and support, they started a small group called “Up With Downs Early Pre-School,” which met a couple of days a week in a local high school. There, both children and parents could learn and help each other.
Word began to spread. More and more parents came seeking education and support. Two mothers wrote a grant proposal and, much to their surprise, got it. The program, known as “Kids on the Move,” grew beyond those facilities, and it became clear they needed their own building. With little funding and escalating demand, the Hahnes and other parents persevered. They begged for money, got government grants, and enlisted the help of a generous community. Today, Kids on the Move is a substantial school for children from birth to age three, and the program’s influence extends well beyond the school and deep into homes and communities. The program currently serves more than fifteen hundred families each year and employes eighty people.
And Reed? This young man, whom “experts” considered a hopeless case, has grown into a wonderful contributor to society. Not only did he learn to talk, he learned to excel. He attended a wonderful high school where he had many friends. For their school “preference” dance, Reed was voted one of the school’s “most preferred,” and he successfully served on student council his senior year. He went to college and got excellent grades. He is a regular speaker at youth events. He was won awards for advocacy and addressed many national groups. Not bad for a young man who wasn’t expected to accomplish anything.
Once ignited, Karen and Bob Hahnes’ passion became an amazing productive force. They faced hardship, discouragement, and the occasional dead end, but their perseverance has benefited thousands of lives and brought hope to many families with nowhere else to turn.
Reed was the Hahnes’ secret to igniting their passion. Likewise, your secret to productivity is to ignite the passions of your team.
The first step in unleashing people is to engage the passion they innately possess and the legacy they want to leave. You don’t have to invite them to have dreams—they already have them. The secret to quantum leaps in productivity is to find that leverage point of meaning that gives life to the human soul.
UNLEASHING PRODUCTIVITY:
INSTRUCTIONS FOR DOWNLOADING
Here are five steps you can take to master making the highest value decisions, staying focused, and having the energy to unleash your own productivity and the productivity of others:
| STEP | ACTIONS |
| 1 ACT ON THE IMPORTANT, DON'T REACT TO THE URGENT. |
Make a list of all the things you do during a typical work week. All of them. Don’t forget email inboxes, papers that need attention, social media updates, phone calls to return, people to get back to. |
Draw four boxes that look like this. Label the boxes as indicated.
| 1. Urgent and Important | 2. Important, Not Urgent |
| 3. Urgent, Not Important | 4. Not Urgent, Not Important |
Drop each action item from your list into one of the four boxes as indicated. Then follow these recommendations:
| BOX | ACTION ITEMS | RECOMMENDATION |
| 1 | Important and urgent things, like putting out fires, taking care of emergencies, meeting close deadlines, etc. | Do them and then analyze how to prevent them in the future. If you are honest, you will see that many of the things in quadrant 1 could have been avoided if you had prepared for them. |
| 2 | Important but not urgent things, like planning your time, working on longterm goals, continuous improvement, preventing future crises, reading, and learning. | Focus your best time and energies here. If you do, you will have plenty of time for the things that really matter. |
| 3 | Unimportant things that are urgent, like some requests from other people, meetings you’ve been invited to but don’t really need to attend, etc. | Say no when possible to these things. A lot of what people ask you to do might not contribute at all to your top goals and personal priorities–and might even be better handled by someone else. |
| 4 | Unimportant things that are not urgent; excessive behavior. | Hold yourself accountable to these things. Don’t let relaxation or break time turn into excess and take away from more important outcomes. |
When you identified the activities in the four boxes, did you limit your responses to work activities only? Go back and list all the other activities in your personal and family lives as well.
Invite your team to go through this exercise. Ask, “What are we doing in boxes 3 and 4 that we shouldn’t be doing at all? What are the things in box 1 that we wouldn’t have to do if we did better preparation work? What are the things in box 2 that we should focus on?”
| STEP | ACTIONS |
| 2 GO FOR EXTRAORDINARY; DON'T SETTLE FOR ORDINARY. |
As a leader, your task is to unleash the extraordinary potential of people, but first you need to find out what their potential is. You can discover it by having this conversation: “Imagine meeting yourself when you leave your current role, whether it’s weeks, months, or years from now …”
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Carry out this experiment for yourself before trying it on others:
- Identify the few most important roles you play and write them down. List your work roles and your “outside of work” roles.
- Write a role statement that describes the extraordinary contribution you want to make in each role. Take your time. Don’t just describe what you do now; write down what you want to do in your current role. In this way you’ll tap into your own passion, discovering what really motivates you and how you can create a better world around you and feel accomplished at the end of every day.
| ROLE | CONTRIBUTION STATEMENT |
Do this exercise with team members. Invite people to write down the answers to these questions on their own and then share them with you.
| STEP | ACTIONS |
| 3 SCHEDULE YOUR PRIORITIES, DON'T PRIORITIZE YOUR SCHEDULE. |
Each week, look closely at your calendar. Then use the box exercise from step 2 to plan the week. Check off each of the following actions: |
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Look at your role statements. What one or two key things can you do this week that will have the most impact on your vision of success? These are your box 2 actions. Schedule them.The biggest threat to your productivity is the very technology designed to accelerate it—your smartphone, your laptop, or your tablet. If you’re typical, you might say hello to your tablet first thing in the morning. You’re checking your mail, you’re reading it during breakfast, then you’re playing games, surfing, checking out social media, doing research all day. You’re on your smartphone, too, constantly texting, ringing people up, texting again, and texting some more. At night, the last thing you see as you fall asleep is the glow of a screen.
The technology is amazingly useful, but it also distracts us and, even worse, can rule our lives.
| STEP | ACTIONS |
| 4 RULE YOUR TECHNOLOGY; DON'T LET IT RULE YOU. |
Schedule times to check your device to avoid the “constant glance.” Stay away from your devices when engaged with people. |
| Invite your team to think through their philosophy about technology. How can you use it better? Is your team caught in a web of electronic distractions? How can you eliminate them? |
You and your team have a big mission that involves intensive work, so you can’t afford to burn out. Keep the fire burning, but in a balanced way. Brain scientists agree that proper exercise, diet, sleep, relaxation, and human connection recharge and even rejuvenate the brain.
| STEP | ACTIONS |
| 5 FUEL YOUR FIRE; DON'T BURN OUT. |
Schedule times to “refuel” yourself. One of your key roles is “self.” |
| Invite your team to make personal plans to take care of these priorities. |