The Five Phases of Project Planning
Filed under: Leadership Callling, Leading Churches, Time Management
One of the most recognized experts in the field of productivity is David Allen. He is the author of many books but probably is best known for Getting Things Done.
The reason I like his approach is that in our day of many complicated business planning models and powerful software applications to back them up he just keeps it simple. When a project is very large and complicated with many moving parts bring on Project Manager with all the charts and spreadsheets.
However, most of the things that we need to get done must start with the core principles of basic planning. If what we are doing cannot be defined in these simple steps then maybe it does not need to be done at all.
For every task that would be large enough to fit into the project category there are five key phases:
1. Defining purpose and principles
2. Outcome visioning
3. Brainstorming
4. Organizing
5. Identifying next actions
We must take the time to clearly define What we are doing and Why. Then we need to see that the end result will be better than our current reality. Once the vision is set then we need a comprehensive plan on How to get there and Who is responsible for every major action item. Finally and probably most important what are the specific goals that need to be accomplished by the next meeting.
Five Keys in Setting Goals
Filed under: Goal Setting, Leadership Callling, Leading Churches, Time Management
All of us have experienced the frustration that comes from really wanting to accomplish something important and thinking we are really committed to it only to realize several months later it did not happen. When I evaluate personally and professionally where the breakdown occurs it usually centers on the disciplines involved in effective goal setting.
These are the five critical things I have learned over the years:
1. Write it down—if it is not important enough to write down in your personal planner or enter into your cell phone list then it will almost always never get done.
2. Check your resources—do you realistically have the time, energy, knowledge, skills and commitment to make this happen?
3. Make it clear—you must be very specific about what you want to accomplish. It cannot be I want to lose weight; it needs to be twenty pounds over next six months.
4. Develop your plan—strategy is the realistic intersection of resources and commitment. There is a big difference in walking twenty minutes five days week and training for marathon.
5. Evaluate your progress—this is where the rubber hits the road. Do it often until you know you have sustainable momentum and most important celebrate every win.
Busyness
Filed under: Family Ministry, Leadership Callling, Life Balance, Personal Development, Time Management
I always recieve the highest evaluation scores when I speek on the subject of how to set personal priorities for own life. The major point of my presentation is that we are all overscheduled because of the wireless connected culture we live in today and we must find a way to say no to many of the things that are robbing us of the priorities we care about the most.
I use a time matrix diagram developed by Stephen Covey that divides all of our daily lives into four quadrants that are based on the two variables of urgency and importance. Everything that is urgent demands some action immediately and the things that are important may not.
If something is urgent and important then it should be done. It could be a doctor’s appointment personally or a major project at work that is due this week. Hopefully for most of us at least the majority of our day should be spent in this category.
The next area is all the things that are urgent but not important. The blackberry is screaming for attention, the inbox is full and there are meetings on the schedule. The problem here is that we have assumed that because something is urgent it must be important.
Another very unproductive area includes the things that are not urgent but they are not important either. The danger here is that when we get home in the evening we want to run away and hide with hours of meaningless T.V. or surfing the net.
The single most important category is the things that are not urgent but very important. This is where family, friends, faith and all of our important relationships reside. Most of the time our family and our friends will not demand our immediate attention but if we neglect them long enough they will move into the urgent category and we will all suffer the consequences.
The only way to find time for the things that really matter is to stop doing so many of the things that really don’t.
Getting Things Done
There is nothing worse than being involved in either personal or professional planning meetings and really think you have come up with some great ideas that really need to be done only to realize later nothing lasting changed.
The critical missing link between the planning and development process to actual execution is taking the time and energy to discipline yourself to set realistic but attainable goals. This process does take time but quite frankly if something is not important enough to invest in developing specific action steps that will help you accomplish your goals then it probably was not worth thinking about in the first place.
When I evaluate personally and professionally where the breakdown occurs it usually centers around these principles involved in effective goal setting.
These are the five critical things I have learned over the years:
1. Write It Down—if it is not important enough to write down in your personal planner, computer task manager or enter into your cell phone to do list then it will almost always never get done.
2. Check Your Resources—do you realistically have the time, energy, knowledge, skills and commitment to make this happen? It may be the right thing to do but this is the wrong time to do it.
3. Make It Clear—you must be very specific about what you want to accomplish and how you are going to do it. It cannot be I just want to lose weight; it needs to be twenty pounds over next six months by exercising an hour day five days a week from 6:00 a.m. to 7:00 a.m.
4. Develop Your Plan—strategy is the realistic intersection of resources and commitment. There is a big difference in walking one hour five days a week and training for a marathon. The strategy must fit the goal so you will not come up short or burn out on the other extreme.
5. Evaluate Your Progress—this is where the rubber hits the road and you must start by building in short term wins to maintain momentum. When you fail or make some mistake know that it is a necessary cost to pay to reach anything in life that is worthwhile.
When we get to the end of our lives it really will not matter how many things we talked about doing but how many things we actually did.
Follow Up Or Fail
Filed under: Leadership Callling, Personal Development, Time Management
I cannot tell you how many people I have worked with over the years that are great at getting something started but totally ineffective in finishing the task with excellence. They get very excited in the creative planning stages of something but when it gets down to execution they lose interest and allow performance to deteriorate.
Keith Ferrazzi in his great book Never Eat Alone says that good follow up alone elevates you above 95% of your peers in every area of your life. In his opinion it is the absolute key to success in any field.
In the area of networking he makes sure that he makes contact with any new person he meets within twelve to twenty-four hours after they have initially met. He says why go to all the trouble of meeting new people if you’re not going to work on making them a part of your life?
This same discipline applies to phone conversations and meetings where commitments have been make for some future action. It is extremely important to get all assignments down in writing and distribution made for all involved giving what is expected, who is responsible and when the project should be completed.
Many times great decisions have been made only to see the idea or project fail not because of poor initial planning but simply not paying attention to all the details involved in implementation. Creativity alone can produce a lot of excitement but follow up alone is what produces sustainable excellence.
Four Generations Of Time Management
Filed under: Goal Setting, Leadership Callling, Time Management
Stephen Covey pioneered this type of thinking several years ago but it is certainly worth repeating based on the incredible pressures we are all under in the area of time management. In a day when it is impossible to do everything that comes our way we must find ways to prioritize the important things and the discipline to say no to everything else.
The first wave or generation of time management could be characterized by simply taking notes and making checklists to try to keep track of all the things we needed to do. To some degree we still use this today but in a much more effective way.
The second generation started to use calendars and appointment books. The big improvement here was in planning ahead and making sure we had an idea of what we wanted to accomplish over a longer period of time. We all still use calendars today and they help us not only in planning but in daily execution as well.
The third generation brought into play the whole concept of prioritization into the process where we try on a daily, weekly, monthly or annual basis to identify those things that are most important and do them first and move the lesser items to the bottom of list. We started setting goals and incorporating those goals into our time planning which place a priority on efficiency.
The emerging fourth generation that recognizes that time management is a misnomer because the ultimate challenge is not to manage time as much as it is to manage ourselves. This whole concept recognizes that just because we can do things faster today they might not be the right things to do and that you cannot a week in advance know everything that should be on the top of your list.
The fourth generation mindset is that I will value relationships over results and I will always be open in the flow of my life to change direction on any given day when a greater priority comes into my life. The use of time is based on core values and is not driven by efficiency but effectiveness.
The Building Blocks Of A Strategy
Filed under: Goal Setting, Leadership Callling, Leading Change, Time Management, Vision Casting
One of the best books I have read on developing a strategic plan and all that is involved in the execution of that plan was written by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan called Execution. It is a must read for any organization that uses teams to accomplish planning and execution.
A strategy is the key steps or methodology that you are going to use to accomplish your goals or mission. Many times the goal seems to be clear and necessary but the breakdown occurs at the point of determining how we are going to accomplish what we want to do.
In this book he lists several critical questions that should be answered during the development of your strategy to ensure a high probability of success:
1. How good are the assumptions upon which the plan hinges?
2. What are the pluses and minuses of the alternatives?
3. Do you have the organizational capability to execute the plan?
4. Are the short term and long term balanced?
5. What are the important milestones for executing the plan?
6. Can you adapt the plan to rapid changes in your environment?
The two most important questions are do you have the organizational capability to execute the plan? Just because it is the right thing to do may not mean we have the right people in place and this is the right time for implementation. If we add something major to our process without additional manpower it must be assumed that something else needs to go.
The last question is even more important in the culture we live in today. Just because something looks great as a strategy today and even works for awhile does not mean that it will be viable in the next twelve months. This means that nothing must become so sacred that it cannot be changed if necessary when a better plan is discovered.
What’s Next?
This phrase became the mantra on the award winning series The West Wing. After every serious issue that had to be dealt with not matter how long the conversation or difficult the task the president would always ask what’s next?
That is a very good question that all of us have to answer each and every day regardless of whether we realize it or not. Inherent within the question is the intention to find the most important things on our must do list and place them at the top.
Most of us allocate a considerable amount of time to plan our weeks and certainly each individual day with pre-determined goals and priorities. However in today’s wired culture we are constantly receiving new information throughout the day that must be processed.
David Allen is recognized as one of the nation’s leading experts on time management and personal productivity. In his book Getting Things Done he list four key criteria about processing new information that help him to answer the what’s next question:
1. Context—A few actions can be done anywhere but most require a specific location or having some productivity tool at hand, such as a phone or a computer. These are the first factors that limit your choices about what you can do in the moment.
2. Time available—When do you have to do something else? Having a meeting in five minutes would prevent doing many actions that require more time.
3. Energy available—How much energy do you have? Some actions you have to do require a reservoir of fresh, creative mental energy while others need more physical horsepower.
4. Priority—Given your context, time, and energy available, what actions will give you the highest payoff? This is where you need to access your intuition and begin to rely on your judgment call in the moment.
The Power Of Momentum
Filed under: Crisis Management, Leadership Callling, Leading Change, Personal Development, Time Management
There are very few things more difficult to deal with in your personal or professional life than a loss of momentum. It can be brought on by some major tragedy or a series of small compromises over a very long period of time.
Eventually we get to a place where we start worrying about things outside our control and that drains us of what little emotional energy we have left. Also because we are so focused on the negative we stop doing the things we should and can do and that brings even more despair.
The only way to break this cycle is to start doing what you can do and build some small daily wins into your life. This principle works with individuals as well as organizations.
With every small win comes movement and that generates confidence that things are finally headed in the right direction. When we regain our confidence then we attempt even more things that product even bigger wins and the power of the momentum begins to put the wind back in our sails.
It is very ironic that when we get to the places of greatest difficulty in our lives it is the very smallest of things that can break the downward cycle. We are desperately searching for the big answer that is going to solve all our problems when the solution was right in front of us all the time.
The good news is that the power of momentum works in a positive way to an even greater degree than it does toward the negative. When you repeatedly do what you can do daily the positive flow of your life moves you beyond all the negative issues that may still be there but now they are in the proper perspective.
The Importance of Knowing Life Purpose
Filed under: Core Values, Family Ministry, Leadership Callling, Life Balance, Marriage, Personal Development, Time Management
In a day when our calendars are beyond full and yet our lives seem to be empty something has gone wrong. We in many cases have assumed because we are busy the things we are doing must be important.
We clearly have shifted the focus from being as a person to doing and what we are able to accomplish. Technology has helped us in many cases simply to do the wrong things faster.
The great paradoxes of our time have been summed up well by the Dalai Lama:
“We have more conveniences, but less time.
We have more degrees, but less sense…more knowledge but less judgment.
More experts, but more problems.
More medicines, but less healthiness.
We have been all the way to the moon and back but have trouble crossing the street to meet the new neighbor.
We build more computers to hold more information that produce more copies than ever before, but have less communication.
We have become long on quantity, but short on quality.
These are the times of fast foods but weak digestion.
It is a time when there is much in the window but nothing in the room.”
For many of us we have been living the script for our lives that were given to us by someone else; parents, peers, friends or the culture we live in. The time has come for us to have the courage to say no and the passion to write our own.