Tag: leadership

Setting Priorities in Your Schedule

Do you make time for what’s most important in your life? The best tip I ever heard for setting priorities was a technique taught in a Franklin Covey time management seminar I attended. This is included as one of Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits, “Put First Things First”, using an object lesson involving rocks.

big rocks are your prioritiesA college professor takes a box of rocks from behind his counter and proceeds to place them into a jar in front of his students. When the jar is full, he asks if there’s room for more. The students say no, because the jar is full. He pulls a box of smaller rocks from behind the counter and proceeds to add them into the jar. Each smaller rock fits into the cracks around the big rocks in the jar. He repeats this question and demonstration pattern with gravel, sand and water until the jar is completely full. What’s the moral of the story? he asks. “You can always fit more,” one student suggests. “No, you have to put the BIG ROCKS in first.” There won’t be room for your priorities if you fill your schedule with little things first.

I heard this lesson and concept nearly 15 years ago but still use it and have found tremendous value in it.

Application

Here’s a way you can try applying this to your own schedule:

  • Step 1 – identify the important roles in your life. For me, that’s husband, father, pastor, employee, manager, mentor, etc. Note that some of these are closely tied together, but I separate them when I’m trying to identify priorities. I prefer to define each unique role in which a person sees me. For me that means, being a pastor (to the congregation I serve) and manager (to the staff I oversee) are distinct.
  • Step 2 – within each role, on a weekly basis, identify the most important thing you should do. What would help you excel in that role for the coming week?
  • Step 3 – once you identify it, block time in your schedule to do that thing for each role. As husband, that may mean date night, or it may mean being home in time for dinner.
  • Step 4 – keep to the schedule that was built around your priorities!

schedule your priorities

Downloadable Resources

I developed worksheets to guide you through Step 1 and Step 2 which you can download here:

Formula for Forward Progress

Ingredients for Forward ProgressI’ve been working through a number of projects lately and I’ve started to see progress in multiple categories. It occurred to me that, in my experience, progress has a very simple formula. To use math lingo, I would contend that Progress is a function of New Ideas, Spare Bandwidth, and Resources. If you hold all of these constant, you will likely maintain the status quo.

Ingredients for Forward Progress

If you can increase at least one of the three, though, I believe progress will result. Here’s why:

  • New Ideas: If you only think about your challenges or operations the way you’ve always thought about them, you’re not likely to see change. New ideas, or innovation, can come from visiting someone else’s organization, going to a training event, or bringing new perspectives into the team. Increase your openness to new ideas and your capacity to think differently. It will pay off.
  • Spare Bandwidth: I’ve written more about margin here, but let me summarize by saying that you can’t build toward progress if you spend all of your time doing the same things. If you can’t break out of your own time routines, it may be time to bring someone in who can contribute spare bandwidth to your efforts. (In the not-for-profit arena, finding a volunteer with some experience in your area of weakness and bandwidth to help you build is a big way to add value.)
  • Resources: Sometimes you have plenty of new ideas and even the bandwidth to execute them, but your limiting factor is resources, financial or otherwise. If you’re a leader with financial decision-making authority, watch for this to be a lid for your team. If new ideas and spare bandwidth are going under-utilized, you may want to look for a way to allocate additional resources.
As in math, you don’t necessarily have to increase every value to achieve a greater result. Adding new ideas can cause progress even if you hold bandwidth and resources constant. And the same is true for each. In fact, sometimes new ideas or spare bandwidth can help you continue to make progress even if you need to decrease resources (cost-savings innovations, e.g.).
Paying attention to these three factors will help you lead your team forward toward your goals and vision.

Spend Second

I’ve been on a “blogs about decision making” roll lately, so I thought it might be good to offer a word of balance. Depending on your circumstances, spending money can be the right way to go as I mentioned in my last post, but I had a valuable revelation recently. 

I was walking into the office one morning and thinking about a situation I was navigating with one of our team members. It was a fairly simple thing but was potentially going to cost about $500 depending on how we went forward. $500 may or may not be a lot of money depending on your total budget, but it was a “Spend or Don’t Spend” decision that I thought merited consideration.

As I weighed the questions, I determined that the spend option would be investing in a tangible asset that would have long-term value for the team, and it would help multiple team members be more efficient. And then I had an idea; there was a chance, albeit remote, that we might have an alternate solution in storage that didn’t cost money. I asked my team member to check it out before we made the final decision. Turns out there were no alternatives so we will be investing, but I still contend there was value in taking a few minutes to consider and check things out. 

Just so you know, I’m not talking about a long deliberation (google the words “analysis paralysis” to keep you on track here); I’m talking about an intentional few minutes to consider alternatives. When I’m rushing along in the flow of business, I don’t always take time to explore options, and some decisions don’t require it. When needed though, it can be a valuable thing to do. In any situation, we may need to spend money but there is often something we can or should do first. Check with someone, pray over the situation, think about it differently, ask for a volunteer or a donor to help with the need, etc. 

I am committed to making the spend decision when it’s needed but I’m convinced it shouldn’t be my first go-to.