When Everything I do is Urgent and Important, What Can I Change?

Stretch yourself thin, stress yourself out, work longer hours (than is sensible), take on more responsibility (than is sensible), and make your job harder (than is sensible). These are the basic rules of what creativity guru Gordon MacKenzie describes as of the Overwork-As-An-End-In-Itself game. He links it with the old illusion that if we just work hard enough and long enough, we will finally be found valuable, finally be found loveable, and finally find security.

Psychotherapist and author Sheldon Kopp said, "Most people don't want to change and most of those who say they do, don't want to really. They just want to be helped to feel better about remaining exactly as they are."

These ideas imply that even those of us who believe we constantly struggle for change, often against great odds, can miss the point entirely: progress doesn't happen until we change ourselves and we won't do that until we realise how much we have invested in not changing at all.

In my work these are important issues because, like many managers, I often ask people to consider doing things differently. (I have this crazy belief that we can do, as Venus and Serena Williams have done, pretty much anything we want to: we just have to be prepared to face the consequences of our desires.)

How aware are you of why you do not change or do not achieve the changes you claim to want? How willing are you to change yourself for the sake of better results, to bring out the best in others, or for more effective collaboration with them? What might the consequences be? Where could you begin?

Beyond heroic management

"Heroism is one of the shortest-lived professions there is." Will Rogers.

Asking people to consider doing things differently usually implies asking them to add something to what they're already doing.

However persuasive the logic, this can be a difficult prospect for people caught in the everyday frenzy of the workplace, up to their armpits in crocodiles. They say, "Look here, everything I do is important. Most of it is urgent and much is overdue. How could I possibly cope with more? Show me!" They have no spare time, not even 20 minutes a week. Every day is full-on, wall-to-wall busy-ness. Do more? Yeah, right!

This tendency to heroic, only-just-staying-on-top-of-it busyness is worth challenging. It might be a Good Look, sustainable for a while but it invariably points to a willingness to keep urgently hacking away with a blunt axe because we're too busy to sharpen it. The axe may represent dulled competencies, inappropriate processes or a lack of insight into personal motivation. Whichever it is, it's counterproductive.

We most certainly can find the time to approach things differently. Everyone and everything stops for diarrhoea. That's when we put down the phone (even heroes do), leave the desk, cancel the meeting, put the project on hold, postpone the journey, tell others they must make their own meals, and discover that we are dispensable and that most things can wait, after all.

All we have to do is make the discovery of smarter practices as important as we make diarrhoea. Better to make that shift in values before the need is forced on you, through calamity, burn-out or failure, for instance.

Successful self-management understands the difference between effectiveness (doing things right) and efficiency (doing the right thing right). It gets all the benefits of a catastrophe, (time to reflect and process experiences, problem-solve, re-build relationships, re-focus and plan), without the catastrophe.

Until we pause to reflect on the true purpose, nature and usefulness of our activities, we will keep trying to solve problems with the very practices that created them and nothing will change. It is important to do this thinking when it seems as though there is no time for it: when everything has become urgent. It is best and more easily done proactively, before it has become an urgent necessity.

Where can we interrupt the cycle long enough to make a start? How can we make time for it?

Take time to make time

Progress begins when we take responsibility for our own part in the difficulties we face, and for generating all the causes of the effects we want to experience. Easy to say but harder to do, without good support.

Increasingly, busy managers and leaders use the discipline of regular mentoring to catch their breath and re-focus. The idea may seem like an unaffordable luxury, but time-saving, stress-reducing, break-through outcomes are normal.

In a safe and gently-challenging setting you can reflect on recent experiences and current challenges to learn from them. You can study and experiment with new practices that break the cycle of recurring problems, and sharpen existing tools for more efficient use. You plan progress, and plan to manage that plan.

Because mentoring sessions are devoted entirely to your specific concerns and individual development, there is a laser-light rather than a torch-beam quality about the process. Regular mentoring to minimise gaps between your ideals and current reality will definitely save you time, effort and heartache.

To begin, schedule a session of between 90-minutes and three hours at three to eight-weekly intervals. If the process can be accommodated or supplemented online, (as EncourageMentors' mentoring can), there are significant time-savings. You are not required to continue with a mentoring arrangement for any set period.

You may take an open-ended approach preceded by our mentoring-preparation and diagnostic surveys to establish useful starting-points, or focus on specific aspects of your self-management, people-management or leadership practices. You set the agenda.

You can make the growth choice or the fear choice

Faced with challenges, it is usually not difficult to see or to learn what needs to change. Mostly, it is common sense. What is really at issue may be a fear of change rationalised by deciding that common sense is either impossible or inconvenient. We choose constantly, as Sheldon Kopp says, between growth and fear. Face your fear and you open the gate to fertile ground for real growth: that is where the learning is. It may require real courage:

• Courage to realise that the problem may be In Here, rather than Out There
  
  
• Courage to acknowledge that we have created a big mess by burrowing deeper into what was originally a smaller one
  
  
• Courage to admit we are stuck at an impasse, that we are lost, that we do not know or cannot do what we are supposed to
  
  
• Courage to admit vulnerability, to call for help and open up to being rescued
  
  
• Courage to resist or ignore the teasing, taunting or poppy-shortening tendencies of others
  
  
• Courage to cross boundaries or explore new ideas
  
  
• Courage to undo the habits of seeing ourselves as powerless victims of things outside of our control, free to complain about those who cause them, who will not permit change or who will not change themselves

Where to begin change

Important, far-reaching change is often more possible than it seems.

Work from the inside-out, beginning where you have total autonomy and control (over change within yourself), next where you have authority over others, then where you have none but there exists the possibility of influence. Conventional efforts reverse the order, trying to influence or control others first.

You already influence others: if you change yourself you alter the strength and intensity of the influence you exert.

Inside-out change works best when done with clarity about personal purpose, values, principles, roles and goals. Establishing these is, for most people, the first move.

Two improvement ideas: efficient decision-making and quality decisions

1. Improve the efficiency of your decision-making.. Create a decision-making continuum and help others play their part in it. You will need to clarify the range of decision-making models you currently apply (and those you want to change or acquire) over differing matters and circumstances. Start by listing the matters you and only you will decide. End with those you want your team to decide without your input or interference, then describe the various models and matters that lie between these extremes. Some people choose four models, others about six.

   If consensus is one of the models, define it: there is no consensus about what it means or how it works in practice. Pseudo-consensus is widespread, and damaging.

   BENEFITS: More efficient delegation as your empowering provides clarity and confidence. Others become more independent and less dithering over decisions. Your time is freed up.

2. Improve the quality of your decision-making. Establish a priority-management system. Sort duties, tasks, meetings, projects and other activities into their relative importance against a simple guide pre-determined to pre-empt and minimise malperformance, crises, emergencies, re-cycled problems, and damaging conflicts.

   This is not particularly difficult once you understand the prime causes of those negative events, though you may need help to come to that understanding.

   BENEFITS: Most people who try this are shocked to discover how much time they spend on matters that (a) are neither important nor urgent; and (b) have become emergencies because non-urgent important things were not attended to. You'll save considerable time and effort, finding increasing time for what is truly important.

© Copyright 2002 - 2007 Tom Watkins Group. All rights reserved.

Select and contact a Mentor if you'd like to discuss these ideas or want support to make progress with your own issues.

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