Getting to It

Jones Loflin, Todd Musig

• Publisher: HarperBusiness
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780062282439
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Time Management

From Jones Loflin and Todd Musig, the authors of Juggling Elephants, comes Getting to It —a practical guide to sorting through the many priorities in your life, showing you how to carefully and consistently evaluate what your IT (Important Thing) should be, and how to get IT done.

How busy are you? In the daily struggle to get it all done, what are you forgetting? Is your mind constantly racing with lists of all the things you could and should be doing? Does your day often feel like you're treading water in an ocean of rushes and deadlines, trying to keep from drowning while handling increasing work and life demands?

Don't give up—help is on the way. You just have to find your It. The Important Thing. Define It. Plan It. Focus on It. Get excited about It.

Identifying It isn't just the first step in the process of getting focused and heading in the right direction, it's every step. Getting to It: Accomplishing the Important, Handling the Urgent, and Removing the Unnecessary provides the necessary tools to accomplish the important, handle the urgent, and get rid of the unnecessary. Want to enjoy a more fulfilling life? Get to It.

Chapter 1

What Is IT?

IN YOUR STRUGGLE TO GET IT ALL DONE, WHAT’S NOT GETTING DONE?

At any time of day, do you find yourself saying “When I get time, I will . . .” or “One day when things are different . . .” and then realizing how familiar that sounds? Do you reflect on the past five years and become frustrated because you’ve yet to accomplish all the things you promised yourself you’d get to by now?

What if a high percentage of your tasks and actions were actually contributing toward accomplishing those things that matter to you? What if you felt as if you actually had time to help other people, giving full attention to the needs of coworkers and customers?

What about life outside of work? What if you actually enjoyed taking your children to their activities and got your errands done in a quarter of the time it takes you now? What if some of the chores on your list became more enjoyable because you’re confident in your ability to get your most Important Things done?

Would you laugh more often and feel more at ease? Would you feel respected and appreciated by clients, friends, neighbors—and even, wonder of wonders, by your teenage children?

Would that be enough of a reason for you to continue reading this book?

What if your schedule allowed more time for personal growth, and you could finally give a higher priority to relaxing and enjoying life? What benefits might result from having the time and enthusiasm to pursue the passions that energize you, inviting you to tackle the long-postponed “if only” items on the bucket list of things you’d like to experience in your life?

It’s not that you haven’t tried to become more organized and efficient many times in the past. You might even use a daily planner or manage your to-do list electronically. You may have a smartphone with buttons worn away from your furious attempts to answer all of your e-mail on the go.

It’s possible that other people already admire you as someone who has it all together. Do you privately wonder how much longer you can maintain your pace and your reputation for always delivering on time? Are you often merely getting by rather than thriving, hoping that something (other than retirement or winning the lottery) will come along to rescue you from this stormy ocean of hurry, deadlines, and the constant juggling act of balancing never-ending work and life demands?

What Is IT?

There is a solution to help get you focused and pointed in the right direction. In a word: IT. Define IT. Plan IT. Focus on IT. Get others excited about IT. Celebrate IT. And then plan for the next IT. Consider this definition:

MAIN ENTRY: It

PRONUNCIATION: \’it\

FUNCTION: Noun/pronoun followed by action

DATE: Today

DEFINITION: The most Important Thing

IT will save you from the avalanche of possibilities that await you every day at work. IT will make the difference in your reaching your full potential and your desired level of success. IT will help you develop and appreciate supportive, positive relationships. IT will guide you in defining who you are as an individual and as a professional, and in clarifying what is important to you.

“That’s it?” you say.

Yes, that’s IT. It’s that simple.

Asking yourself, Of all the paths I could take, which is the most important at this moment? may at first seem simplistic and obvious, and no different from what you do now.

The problem, you tell yourself, isn’t in deciding what must be done; often circumstances or other people have made those decisions for you. The problem is in all the steps required to actually accomplish a number one priority.

For example, a marketing director might identify IT as a badly needed strategy for launching the company’s new product. That part was easy. Execution is something quite different. Finding the time to devote to IT, getting people who are currently overloaded and already moving in twenty different directions to focus on IT, and securing the necessary financial resources from an already strained budget are far from simple tasks. The very next step after IT has been defined can result in frustration and delay. Maybe, in this example, the marketing director senses that a sales incentive strategy—a whole new, complex IT—has to be developed to support the new marketing strategy. How does he decide which is the priority?

As you will see in the chapters to come, identifying IT isn’t just the first step in a process, it’s every step.

Constantly stepping back and analyzing what’s driving your choice of IT is more than just a useful exercise, it’s critical. Clarity of thought and purpose is necessary not only in determining IT, it’s essential to efficiently organizing all the steps required to accomplish IT.

IT: of everything you could do in the next moment, the most IMPORTANT THING.

Certainly, defining one IT at the outset is crucial. Getting IT wrong can have disastrous consequences for individuals as well as entire organizations. Also, leaving IT undefined can cause priorities to be at cross-purposes with one another, making your days busy but rarely productive or meaningful.

Consider a few examples:

• The week you had a deadline approaching for a report, you chose to work on less important tasks because you weren’t thrilled about working on IT.

• Upon walking into your office in the morning, you turn on your computer and open up your e-mail. Nine hours later, you have spent the entire day basically managing your e-mail as it comes into your box. Nothing of significance has been accomplished.

• Your child is riding her bike without training wheels for the first time. When she calls, “Look at me!” you call back, “I see you.” But the fact is, your preoccupation with office work had your mind a thousand miles away, and you hadn’t actually seen her first wobbly minutes as a bike rider.

• Taking an hour for yourself to engage in your favorite hobby or just relax creates guilt and anxiety, because you constantly feel as if there’s something more important you should be doing.

So where do you begin? How do you ensure that you know what IT is and that you have the opportunity to work on IT today?

Types of ITS, and the Need to Identify Them

At the risk of sounding like Dr. Seuss: There are big ITs and little ITs, easy ITs and difficult ITs. There are ITs that make you want to get out of bed in the morning and ITs that make you want to hide under the bedcovers all day.

ITs can be classified according to their time scales. Long-term ITs might range from your lifetime achievements (becoming a successful parent, a loving spouse, a pillar of the community, a world-class musician) to goals that require only a year or two to accomplish. For organizations, a long-term IT could take five or more years to complete.

Short-term ITs are goals you want to accomplish in six months to a year. You may find that this type of goal setting is the most typical kind in your life—losing weight, overcoming that hitch in your golf swing, repainting the house, learning Italian. Since childhood, you’ve learned the importance of working day by day toward such goals: you can’t become fluent in Italian the night before your flight to Rome. For organizations and entrepreneurs, short-term ITs—implementing a new software system, relocating manufacturing to a new building, or securing funding—may take one to three years to accomplish.

Daily ITs are the “here and nows.” Most often, they’re in competition with a thousand other demands on your time and energy. Over the course of a day, you may encounter numerous paths that could be taken, but probably only two or three really lead to completing today’s IT.

It’s important to define IT frequently as you move through your day. Routinely defining IT creates an opportunity to ensure you are on the right path, prepared to accomplish the most critical task of each moment. Consider these examples:

• Look at successful athletes. They never stop focusing on doing their best, whether in competition or during practice.

• Think about productive coworkers around you. Factoring out lunch, breaks, and interruptions, they rarely focus on something other than their work.

• Watch any true artist (painter, dancer, singer, musician, etc.) display his or her skill. When performing, they don’t allow any thoughts to enter their minds that are not related to creating a stellar performance.

Such people spend an enormous amount of their time and mental focus thinking, planning, and evaluating every motion toward one purpose: the successful accomplishment of their overriding task or goal.

When you identify your IT for any period of time, you start a process of planning to make IT successful. Just asking, What is my IT in the next minute? sharpens your focus and helps ensure the right things get done in those sixty seconds.

The longer the period of time needed to accomplish IT, the more detailed the process and strategies might need to be to ensure that IT gets done. As we mentioned earlier, ITs come in all sizes.

Let’s examine the need to focus on IT with a situation that might occur in the typical workday of Sam, a manager at a large insurance company. His IT for the next sixty minutes is to craft a job description for a new position within his department. He begins with the best intentions, reviewing his notes and data from the past six months. Three minutes into this demanding mental task, he hears the ding of an e-mail notification and glances up to see whom it’s from. He doesn’t read the message, but it’s now on his mind, and he keeps wondering if he should check it out. He chooses to return to his primary task, but the mere act of thinking about e-mail has gotten him off track. He rereads what he’s written, picks up his train of thought, and adds a couple of sentences. Then his phone rings. He doesn’t answer it, but he looks to see who it is. It’s Belinda. His mind races as he wonders what it is that Belinda might want. He resists the urge to answer the call because he knows he needs to get this job description done!

Sam is now thirty minutes into his IT. Some superb ideas are taking shape . . . just as Julie approaches him about a vacation-scheduling issue. Sam would like to put Julie off, but he knows he’s been avoiding her about this for a few days. Sam tells her he has only twenty mi...