Polson Higgs
On it not In it – Yeah Yeah
8th Dec 2009 | 9:02 pm | By Graham Crombie - CEO
I’m sure you have all heard the cry – stop working in your business and start working on it! Easy to say, hard to do – especially in these difficult times.
The fact is however you will be unable to improve your businesses growth, profitability and value without dedicating time to specific ON activities that contribute to the bigger picture of your business.
Too often we get caught up doing the technical activities and fighting fires as they arise. This simple model will help you understand that if you focus on the ON activities, then the fires you are fighting on a regular basis will diminish.
Have you ever read Steven Covey's "7 Habits of Highly Effective People?" Habit 3 is putting first things first and what he recommends is that we categorize our activities according to the following criteria.
- Are they urgent and important? These activities are often deadline driven, you need to get a report in, deal with a crisis, they're difficult to plan for.
- Are they not urgent but important? So those activities that help contribute to the smooth overall running and growth of the business - training, relationship building and developing systems to prevent the crises in this quad.
- Are they not important but urgent? Some meetings that you know you don't really need to be a part of for example.
- And lastly are they not urgent and not important. So these might be surfing the web, a longer than necessary conversation or email about non-work matters. There's nothing wrong with these and in fact for our own sanity we need them every now and then.
Take a minute to think about your day and put your various activities into the model.
Sometimes it is useful to have an example to help get you started.
Think about fire fighters, what are their urgent and important activities? Obviously fighting fires, but interestingly it's not where they spend most of their time. Instead the majority of their time is spent doing the important but not urgent activities, so that when they do need to move into the important and urgent quadrant, they are fully equipped and prepared to best fight the fire.
Most of their time is spent training, testing and maintaining their equipment and fine tuning their fire engines.
You're not likely to be fighting life threatening fires, but you can probably identify a couple of your own fires you'd like to permanently extinguish. So to help you extinguish these fires, we need to work like the fireman and spend more time in the top right quadrant.
And this is what we call working ON your business rather than IN it.
Time is finite, so if you're spending most of your time in the top left quadrant, and a lot of these activities you mentioned looked like IN activities, then you just don't have the time to dedicate to the ON activities.
And looking at your ON activities, they certainly contribute to the long term growth and profitability of your business. So we need to spend more time working ON the business.
That is, identify how we can reduce the fires you're fighting - and what systems we can develop so that the end result is you having to work less IN the business.
Polson Higgs is committed to helping our clients start to work on their business. We have been focusing recently on working with people to ensure they are positioned as well as possible to come through this difficult economic period. This may be in the human resource area – getting the right people doing the right stuff, it may be in the financing area where we are helping firms get their funding lines right or it may be in debt collection processes to ensure cash is flowing. There are countless examples within the firm.
Please email me at graham.crombie@ph.co.nz if you would like to chat about some simple ways to start working on your business.
PS
For those who were following the ½ marathon runner I’m delighted to report that the first half has been completed. The great news is that entry to the New York marathon for next year has been received – training is stepping up. I will keep you informed of progress.
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Last updated: 9th Dec, 2009 | 10:01 am
