The 5 Choices

The Path to Extraordinary Productivity

Kory Kogon, Adam Merrill, Leena Rinne

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781471142376
• eBook ISBN: 9781471142383
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Every day brings a crushing wave of demands: a barrage of texts, emails, interruptions, meetings, phone calls, tweets, blogs - not to mention the high pressure demands of our jobs - is overwhelming and exhausting. The sheer number of distractions threaten our ability to think clearly and make good decisions. If we react to these stimuli, moving mindlessly from one task to another, we will fail to accomplish the things that matter most in our professional and personal lives. In this book, readers will learn how to make the five fundamental choices that will increase their ability to achieve what matters most to them. Backed by science and FranklinCovey's years of experience and research in this field, The 5 Choiceshelps readers increase their productivity and develop an inner sense of fulfillment and peace. The 5 choices are simple but require a radical shift in mindset and will lead to increased personal and professional success.

CHOICE 1

ACT ON THE IMPORTANT, DON’T REACT TO THE URGENT

Anything less than a conscious commitment to the important is an unconscious commitment to the unimportant.

—Dr. Stephen R. Covey

Kiva lay in bed in the morning trying to shake off the grogginess from the previous night’s short rest. She’d gone to bed quite late. Her alarm pounded in her ears. She knew she should exercise. She wanted to. Before she went to bed, she even downloaded the latest power-yoga app. She smacked off the alarm.

The tasks of the upcoming day quickly flooded her mind. A large project at work had a looming deadline. And there were about a million things that needed to be done floating around in her mind. Anxious, she immediately went for her smartphone to check for emails from the project team.

“Immediate attention!” “Critical data!” “Needs your review and decision today!”

Of the thirty emails that had come in since she put her phone down the night before, many of them looked vital. Some were junk mail; she quickly deleted those. Some were unclear, so she began to scroll through them to see if any of them required her attention. Before she knew it, she’d spent forty-five minutes checking her email and hadn’t even left the bed.

“Oh, well,” Kiva sighed, accepting that she’d forgone her chance to try her new yoga routine. In fact, she realized, if she didn’t get going, she would be late for work.

After hurriedly taking a shower, putting on some makeup, and staring at her closet to see which outfit was the least wrinkled, she dressed and headed out the door, pausing just long enough to leave a note for her housemate in the other room to take out the trash and pick up some coffee on the way home.

Ten minutes later, she stopped by a java hut in the train station to grab a bagel and a latte (better make it a double . . . or a triple?), and jumped on the train just as it was about to depart. She looked around and found a seat next to a man who looked way too relaxed for this time in the morning. She shrugged it off, reached in her satchel, and opened her tablet.

She had an important planning meeting today and needed to get some numbers together. She had hoped to do it yesterday, but there was that urgent request from Karl, who always seemed to bug her at the most problematic times! Maybe he had a crisis radar that activated every time she was under pressure. Wow! And last week he even had the gall to ask her out. What! Are you kidding? Sorry, Karl.

She scanned her numbers and realized she was missing some key input from Kellie. She quickly texted: “I need those inventory reports by 9:00. Can you get them to me?” A few seconds later, the text came back from Kellie: “I’m on it!”

“Great!” She thought, “Kellie is so responsive. I’m so glad she’s on my team. I can always count on her in a pinch.”

While she was shuffling through some papers, the guy sitting next to her gave her a look that was somewhere between bemused and annoyed. “Oh, well,” she thought, “he probably doesn’t have a real job anyway. He’s probably a part-time art professor or something. Certainly not someone who has important business to get done.” She buried her head deeper in her reports.

During the twenty-minute ride into town, Kiva congratulated herself for using her commute time so well. She had gotten the reports from Kellie, sent off ten more emails to members of her team so that they knew she was paying attention, and gathered the key numbers she needed for her planning meeting.

Her day went pretty much as it always did—hopping from one meeting to the next. Decisions, decisions! The project was pretty close to its original timeline and everybody seemed to be pulling their weight. There was one vendor who never got it right the first time, and always asked for more money to handle increases in scope. “We knew the Web component would be big, right?”

If only she didn’t have to spend so much time dealing with corporate reports and internal politics. There were a number of projects going on, and everybody needed the same resources at the same time. She had spent ninety minutes that afternoon just trying to secure the programming resources she needed this week that had suddenly been pulled to another project. Really?

As she closed her laptop at seven that evening, she still had a few more emails to send. (Thank heaven for the train ride home!) She glanced up and plotted an exit path that would take her behind Karl’s desk so that he wouldn’t see her. She left the building and took a deep breath of the crisp evening air. Ahhh! If she were lucky, she could make it home in time for a take-out meal (Japanese? Italian? Korean?) and catch a couple of episodes of her favorite show online to unwind.

Let’s look at Kiva’s life for a moment. Is she, as she thought, productive?

Think about it for a minute.

She’s working on important things—even critical things. She’s using her time to get things done. She’s got a number of electronic devices to help her communicate with others. She’s connected. She’s wired. She’s moving things forward and making things happen.

So, is she productive?

The answer to that question is rooted in the principle of discernment, which is defined as the ability to judge well. This principle is at the heart of effective decision management and how we use our brains.

HOW WELL ARE YOU USING YOUR BRAIN?

In a knowledge-work world where we are paid to think, create, and innovate, a primary tool for creating value is our brain. So, before we go further, let’s gain a little understanding about how our brain works.

Don’t worry, we won’t delve deep into advanced psychology or brain chemistry. We will simply talk about two basic parts of our brain: the Reactive Brain and the Thinking Brain.

The Reactive Brain is the lower part of your brain. It is the source of the fight-or-flight response and is also where we process our feelings and emotions. Importantly, as we will see, it is also where your brain processes pleasure and enjoyment. Most of these processes happen automatically, before we have time to think about what is going on. The Reactive Brain is also the place of acquired yet deep-seated habits. These are the patterns of thinking and behavior we’ve placed there so strongly that they have become unconscious and automatic—like driving to work while we are busy thinking about something else.

Scientists say that the Reactive Brain was built to ensure our survival as far back as prehistoric times. Imagine a figurative caveman walking in the forest. His survival depended on his ability to react quickly, without thinking, to an immediate threat, like a saber-tooth tiger. If he didn’t move fast, he would be that tiger’s lunch.

In contrast, the upper part of our brain, the Thinking Brain, is the place where we make conscious and very intentional decisions. It is often called the executive function, because it is where we can consciously direct and override other impulses from the Reactive Brain. It is where we act rather than react. It is where we choose to pay attention to something in a deliberate, thoughtful way.

Because the responses of the Reactive Brain are deeply ingrained, they take very little energy. They happen fast and, unless we consciously choose a different course of action, the Reactive Brain rules—grabbing our attention away from higher thoughts to more immediate stimuli.

Much of the advertising we see is designed to appeal to the Reactive Brain—startling motions, surprising sounds, sexual imagery, and so on. In the words of one researcher, “The implications for marketers are clear: to move people quickly and with the least amount of resistance, we need to focus much of our effort on low-road physical and emotional processing, which are the superhighways to the consumer unconscious.”¹ In this view, we are simply wallets with neurons attached—the goal being to capture enough of our reactive neurons to get access to our wallets!

The Thinking Brain, by contrast, takes more time and effort, but it is where we transcend our primitive responses, regulate our behavior, and make better choices about what to do. This is the part of the brain that explains why humans effectively left the cave and created civilization and culture. Our ability to choose a more thoughtful response to something is at the heart of what it means to be human.

The good news from neuroscience is that, with practice, we can actually rewire our brains to be more thoughtful and discerning about our choices. It is in those discerning choices that we determine the quality, joy, and happiness of our lives.

ON BEING INTENTIONAL

So, what does all this have to do with Kiva?

The question about her productivity rests on the deeper question about how she is using her brain. Put another way, has she been discerning amid all the pressures and demands for her time, attention, and energy to make the thoughtful, high-value choices that will allow her to feel truly accomplished at the end of the day?

The same principle applies to all of us. In order to be truly productive, we need to gain the habit of being conscious and intentional about everything we do. In today’s world, we can’t just go on the “I have a busy life” autopilot and expect to end up where we want to be.

To be truly productive and make those high-value decisions, it helps to have both a framework and a process. FranklinCovey’s Time Matrix provides the framework, and Pause-Clarify-Decide (PCD) provides the process.

THE TIME MATRIX™

FranklinCovey’s Time Matrix model is one of the most enduring frameworks for helping people manage their time and represents a whole way of thinking. It allows us to be discerning so we can make good decisions about where to spend our time, attention, and energy.

It is based on the interaction of things that are urgent and things that are important. Here’s how we define those words:

• Urgent. Something that feels like it has to be done right now, whether or not it makes a difference in terms of results.

• Important. Something that, if not done, will have serious consequences in terms of results.

The Time Matrix model illustrates that people spend their time, attention, and energy in one of four quadrants, depending on how urgent and important their activities are.

Q1 IS THE QUADRANT OF NECESSITY

Quadrant 1 (Q1) contains things that are both urgent and important. It is filled with crises (like a hospital visit), emergency meetings, last-minute deadlines, pressing problems, and unforeseen events. These are the things that need to be done now and, if not done, could have serious consequences. That’s why we call it the quadrant of necessity. These things come at you—an angry client is on the phone, a family member has a heart attack, the server goes down, your boss needs something now, or a big opportunity comes up that needs attention immediately or it will slip away.

If you spend a lot of time in Q1, you may feel productive and energized, but if you spend too much time there, you may also burn out. Spending all your time dealing with the drama of crises and pressing problems will keep your stress levels high and drain you of your best thinking and creative energy. Although it is often necessary to be in Q1, it is rarely where we do our best, most creative, and highest-value work, even though it may feel like it at the time.

In investment terms, you usually get out what you put in. It’s essentially a break-even quadrant for the attention and energy you spend there. You may even get some short-term attention for your supposed heroics but, in the overall scheme of things, it’s not a solid foundation for enduring success.

Q3 IS THE QUADRANT OF DISTRACTION

Quadrant 3 (Q3) activities are urgent but not important. Because things here are urgent, they feel like they need to be done now, but really, there are no serious consequences if you don’t do them. Here you find needless interruptions; unnecessary reports; irrelevant meetings; other people’s minor issues; unimportant emails, tasks, phone calls, status posts, and so on.

Many people spend a lot of time in Q3 thinking they’re in Q1. However, they’re just reacting to everything coming their way. They are confusing motion with progress, action with accomplishment.

If we spend a lot of time here, we can be busy but ultimately unfulfilled. A full calendar and to-do list don’t ne...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for The 5 Choices
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication page
• Contents
• Introduction: Feeling Buried?
• DECISION MANAGEMENT
• Choice 1: Act on the Important, Don’t React to the Urgent
• Choice 2: Go for Extraordinary, Don’t Settle for Ordinary
• ATTENTION MANAGEMENT
• Choice 3: Schedule the Big Rocks, Don’t Sort Gravel
• Choice 4: Rule Your Technology, Don’t Let It Rule You
• ENERGY MANAGEMENT
• Choice 5: Fuel Your Fire, Don’t Burn Out
• Conclusion: Your Extraordinary Life
• SPECIAL SECTION: BEING A Q2 LEADER
• What Leaders Can Do
• Building a Q2 Culture in Your Organization
• Appendix A: Top 25 Email Protocols
• Appendix B: Key Models
• Acknowledgments
• Endnotes
• About the Authors
• Index