CHAPTER 17

Get Your Priorities Straight

What if I were your boss and presented you a four-year plan in which I wanted you to go on 5,040 appointments that were about forty-five minutes long each. What would you say? That's 1,260 per year, 105 per month, or seven per day in addition to any other work you have to do. Would you say, “Sure, Nathan, that sounds totally reasonable and not crazy at all!” and then leave, no questions asked? Or would you stare at me in total disbelief, mutter under your breath, “You're nuts,” and think about where to send your résumé when you get back to your desk?

Chances are you lean toward the latter. Most people do when I ask them. But if you did, then next time you hear a teenager complain about all they have to do in high school—you know, the ones we call spoiled, entitled, and lazy?—you'd better think twice before responding. The number of appointments I just laid out is what we ask the average high school student to do over four years in terms of classes. Only we expect them to complete those appointments in only 180 days (the length of most school years), or thirty-six weeks.

Here's the math: The average number of class periods in a school day is seven: 7 classes × 180 days × 4 years = 5,040 appointments.

And that's in a six-hour day with forty-five minutes for lunch! I'm giving you fifty-two weeks and (even if you just work nine to five) a minimum of two extra hours on the clock to complete the same amount of appointments and do all your other work. Okay, fifty weeks if you take vacation. That's still an extra fourteen weeks and ten hours a week. Still think it's impossible to manage? Well, the solution isn't to move back in with your parents but to shift your mindset about how to schedule time and prioritize what you must do as a leader in the middle.

We don't afford our kids the choice to go to high school and do what they need to do. We must do the same and choose to prioritize the activities of coaching and serving to manage our time better.

Lack of Priorities

What do you hear when someone says, “I want to work smart, not hard.” My Millennial son's high-school friends say this all the time. What they mean, of course, is they want to work less and get paid more, not make more time in the day to get things done. But I'm not just dumping on Millennials here. My experience is this phrase has become the ultimate justifier for people of any age who want to do less. Working smart should be about getting sixty hours of results from forty hours of work, not doing as little as possible while “working” forty hours a week and still keeping your job.

Working smart comes down to one thing: owning your priorities and making smart choices. Most leaders know this, yet even the smartest of us fail to do this. My kids were Harry Potter fans, and I always think of Hermione Granger (the smart witch) when I say this. In the first movie, she yells at Harry and Ron Weasley, “I hope you're pleased with yourselves. We could all have been killed. Or worse, expelled.” To which Ron replies, “She needs to sort out her priorities.” So do you.

Simply put, a lack of (or unclear) priorities is the number one contributor to a leader's time management problems. But in all fairness, it's easy to confuse priorities as leaders in the middle. What do you do first: Serve the boss and do the report she just asked for? Deal with the customer who needs our attention or that client whose deal is falling apart? Get those employee reviews that HR needs now? Push all those things off and hold my weekly one-on-one with my top performer? Any of the other countless urgent and important things on my to-do list? The list of urgent and important things on a leader in the middle's to-do list is always overwhelming and always has been. This is why Stephen Covey and hundreds of other experts have tried to help us sort out what we mean by “urgent” and “important.” So why do we continue to fail at getting on top of those to-do lists? It's not only in understanding the difference between important and urgent but also understanding what we must do to lead and prioritize as a leader in the middle.

The important tasks you don't do lead to bigger problems long term and the inability of your team or you to handle them quickly and efficiently.

What Do I Mean by “Important”?

In case you have never covered this before or need a refresher on definitions, let me lay out the difference between “important” and “urgent” tasks. Note: Although some tasks can be urgent and important and thus essential to deal with immediately, more than 99 percent of all tasks fall into these categories:

• Important tasks are proactive activities we need to do in order to develop our business, our people, and ourselves. They are almost always designed to lead to positive results and getting better at what we do.
• Urgent tasks are usually the result of things that are happening to us or our teams as a result of problems or requests, and thus, reactive. Not all urgent tasks are negative—some are immediate opportunities that are great—but even those can become negative when they get in the way of what is really important.

Whereas the consequences of not doing the important tasks are much greater than not doing the urgent ones, leaders in the middle choose to prioritize the urgent ones because of the nature of those consequences:

• The consequences of not doing important tasks are devastating but rarely result in any immediate short-term pain. The damage may not be felt for weeks, months, even years. The work they require takes weeks to take effect so leaders in the middle put them off.
• The consequences of not doing the urgent tasks are often not as devastating in the long term as important ones, but the pain is more pronounced and immediate. Humans prefer comfort over pain, so leaders in the middle tend to focus on those urgent tasks, no matter how small they are.

What we choose to do when faced with these consequences is why time management is a will issue, not a skill issue. It's not how we deal with the tasks and consequences or what we do, but choosing to make the important or urgent a lower priority. Leaders in the middle too often go for the urgent. After all, they're urgent, right?

I've had countless leaders in the middle tell me that they can't do all their coaching activities—one-on-one meetings, ride days, scrimmages—because everyone is always busy handling some problem. And therein lies the problem: Solving a problem, dealing with a situation, or checking a box by completing an urgent task instead of focusing on an important one can undermine leaders in the middle, even as things are getting done.

Lack of an Important Focus Can Create Urgent Consequences

Let's consider what I mean from a “serve out” perspective, and a task I think we all can agree is important: keeping customers updated. Of course, everyone loves calling customers with good news. Who wants to sit on news that will make everyone feel good? Once we are sure the good news is ready to share, we make sharing it the most urgent and important thing on our list. The opposite is true too: Whereas most of us hate calling customers with bad news, we know we have to. Unless the consequences are immediate and severe, we might try and solve the problem or at least get a solution in motion before contacting the customer, but we can't hide the news. We know the task is urgent and important, and we have to do it.

But what about when there is no news to share? Whether you think the phrase “No news is good news” is true or not, no news is only good news if you give it. No news is lazy behavior if you use it as an excuse for not calling customers. “But Nathan, I had nothing new to share so it wasn't necessary to call, right?” Wrong. Think about how you felt when you were waiting for news on something big to you: a home loan, tickets for the show your kids wanted for Christmas, a delivery that might not arrive in time. The longer you go without knowing anything, the more your thoughts turn to the negative. It becomes harder and harder to have faith and stay positive, even if you trust the people who are working on it.

People hate not being informed. Customers don't mind if you have a lack of news or information, but they hate not knowing that. Not knowing makes them feel unimportant, which is especially bad if they are important. That's why I always enforced the “Head on the Pillow Rule” for my leaders in the middle: Your head should never hit the pillow unless you and your team have made and returned all important phone calls, including those “no news” calls: “Hey, just wanted to give you a heads-up that we're still on target but haven't heard anything new. If you have any questions, give me a call, but we're still on it.”

We can all agree that calls like this are not urgent, just important, so there are often no immediate consequences. Problem is, by not doing this task, you potentially create immediate urgent problems and tasks:

• Upset customers who demand more attention and thus more of your time, affecting other tasks.
• Paranoid customers who think something is wrong and want more updates and details of everything that is happening—even threatening to go to the competition unless the “problem” (which doesn't exist but now does in their minds) is fixed.
• Annoyed bosses whom you did not serve because they got repeated calls from that customer through the weekend.

Since actions express our priorities, ignoring my pillow rule over time and not calling back customers makes them believe they are not priorities. Keep ignoring it and even the most understanding customers will start complaining of bad customer service—a reputation that spreads quickly in the age of social media. That's a real problem that can't be fixed by a couple of phone calls and may never get resolved. All because the leader in the middle failed to see the consequence of an important task and understand a fundamental rule of all consequences: The longer the delay of the consequence, the larger the impact.

The Justification Trap

What the “Head on the Pillow” rule really avoids is justifying not using our time for the activities of serving up and coaching down. And let's face it, we all look for reasons not to do them. Because important serve/up coach down tasks involve things like studying, practicing, and learning not only lack immediate consequences but also offer little or no immediate gratification. It's easy to say, “Why do it?”

Solving the smallest urgent problems sate our need for immediate gratification. Who doesn't love that sense of accomplishment we get in crossing something off our to-do lists? Even better, I can use those urgent tasks as a justification for not doing the less fun, more difficult important stuff. Fill in the blank with something that happened this past week, and you know exactly what I mean: “Man, I was going to do that very important task, but [fill in the blank] happened today, and I had to jump on it immediately.”

All that excuse does is put short-term actions over long-term gains. It's the way leaders in the middle get sucked into the “circle of urgent”—the whirlpool of fires we must put out to seemingly keep our jobs instead of doing the important things that would prevent those fires from spreading in the first place.

I say “seemingly” because those fires always seem worse when you lack perspective. Think back on any fires you put out more than a year ago and ask yourself the following questions: Am I still putting out the same fires and dealing with the same issues that led to them? Are we any better at handling them? If the answers to both these questions aren't enthusiastic yesses, then you are focusing too much on the urgent tasks. You also probably have a morale issue and definitely have a time management issue when it comes to serving up and coaching down.

Serve Up/Coach Down Mindset: Get Your Priorities Straight

Do you make excuses for not meeting your obligations to your boss, your team, and your organization? As in, “I can't find the time to coach because those other tasks are a priority” Then you need to make a choice to make them more important than all the urgent (but not important) tasks on your to-do list. The wrong mindset is always about justifying how not to be better. The right mindset is about using your time to prioritize serving up and coaching down to be better.

The wrong mindset fueled by poor coaching and an inability to serve up: I was going to do all those coaching activities, but I got too busy. Everything else demanded my time. People needed me now, now, now. So forget what I said about what's important. Let's get this done, and when nothing else is urgent, we'll get back to the one-on-ones and scrimmaging.

The correct mindset fueled by great coaching and an ability to serve up: I know if I am to serve my boss and accomplish what is expected of me, I need to be coaching my employees and make that my number one priority. Coaching activities must be as or more important than urgent.

This brings us to the next chapter, and the one skill you can teach yourself and coach your team on when it comes to time management—as long as you have the will to commit to it: the must-do list.