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2. Seeing the Wood for the Trees

A 2002 Harvard Business Review article, “Beware the Busy Manager” suggests that only 10% of us have the right combination of focus and energy that stops us wasting our time with “busy work” and keeps us focused on the real work that matters.

So how do you deal with this?

Invest time in thinking through how your work relates to your main priorities or indeed the key strategic goals of your organisation. Look at how your time is being used and what you are saying yes to and what you are also consciously saying No to.

Write yourself a Future letter. Things should seem a whole lot clearer to you when you do.

Paint a powerful image in your own mind of what you want to achieve and find a few simple ways to remind yourself daily of that top-down perspective. One client of mine made a gorgeous Chinese talisman to remind her of her special focus. Resist adding so much detail to your picture that it adds clutter rather than clarity to what’s important for you.

If you lead a team, work with the team to pull together ten images that sum up where you and your team are heading and what success looks like. Share them ,discuss them and agree them so that everyone feels a motivating association with this imagery. This is why regiments have emblems, football teams have jerseys and special logos and countries have anthems and flags.

Then ask your team: What are the three most important things we can be doing to help get us to this vision? Agree how you are all going to keep yourselves focused on that specific vision without getting distracted by the “small stuff”.

"Regular Pruning of the Hedges". One of the hardest tasks of all is the actual pruning process. In order to prune, we have to be prepared to take out the clippers and get rid of the unnecessary. Otherwise, the roses will be stifled and not blossom as nature intended them to.

What pruning do you need to attend to? What tasks have you outgrown that someone else might find some learning in? Have you been too long working and over tending one area at the expense of other areas that could do with your urgent attention?

You can’t be everything to everyone. In fact, to be effective you’ve got to start making some choices about what you’ll be to whom. So stop the doing for a moment. And turn your attention to the interacting.

Action:

Who are the three internal people who matter most?
What do they want? What does that tell you?
Who are the three external people (or groups of people) who matter most? What do they want? What does that tell you?

Once you are clear in your mind what work matters, start saying no to the superfluous. What are you choosing to say Yes to today?

Don’t take my word for it! Read what smart people thinking out loud have to say about developing perspective here

Arthur Schopenhauer (German philosopher): "Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world."

Albert Einstein: "In the middle of every difficulty lies opportunity."

Mao Tse Tung: “We think too small, like the frog at the bottom of the well. He thinks the sky is only as big as the top of the well. If he surfaced, he would have an entirely different view.”

More Reading: Mark Forster’s Get everything done and still have time to play; Stephen Covey’s First Things First