People love to be validated by their friends. We find a sense of approval and up-lifting of our spirits when people speak words of encouragement into our lives. Below is an excellent video that shares about how words can go a long way in building each person’s life.

It is a very touching video and I hope it speaks love to you.

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Let’s face it, people hate to fail. I don’t like failing, but if I ever need to fail, I have to fail forward. Failing forward means to learn something from my experience and still do something good out of the situation.

Donald Trump, America’s biggest real estate tycoon shares in his book: Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and Life:

Do not view any failure as the end. Learn from your lessons quickly, then move on. Do not dwell on the failure. Start thinking big again. Fill your mind with thoughts that make you feel good, plans for the future, past successes, good things your friends said about you, anything that puts a positive spin on your inner dialogue.

Learn the art of forgetting. Move on and do not give a thought to the bad things that have happened to you. Do not be an idealist, wishing things were different, wishing bad things had never happened, and wishing you lived in a fairy tale world where everything turns out right. Do not wait for everything to be perfect before you start taking action again. Be a realist. It will never be perfect. Just resolve to do better, then move on, forgetting the past. View every failure as a step on the way to ultimate success. Remember, persistence plus learning from mistakes equals success.

Failing is part of the feedback loop in life. If we dwell on it, it does not serve us at all. Great people became great because they learnt to overcome it and not commit the same mistake again. Always fail forward!

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I know that this statement sounds like a mouthful. Before we answer that statement, we must first define the terms:

Efficient- Being able to perform a task quickly without consuming too much resource (Eg, time, money and etc).

Effective- Being able to do what is important.

In your everyday work, just look around and ask, “Am I concentrating on doing things Efficiently or Effectively?”

I dare say that most people are concerned with being efficient, but rarely ask the bigger question, whether what they do first of all, is what really matters. We are usually concerned with how to do things faster, or even creating Standard Operating Procedures (SOP)s to rinse and repeat the whole process. While this is good, it fails to answer what really manners at the end of the day?

In my training with managers and executives, I often ask them what are the top 3 important areas of their work they need to focus on and how much time of the week actually gets devoted to it. The answer is usually astonishing! They end up doing so many things that demand their attention that they fail to do what really matters in their job (Efficient, but not Effective). It is important to know what really matters and start from there, rather than rush in and do things fast.

It is only when we realise what being effective means to us and our boss (yes, bosses usually seem to have different standards of what effectiveness mean), then can we proceed to be efficient in what we are doing. The worst thing to do is to be efficient in what we do, only to find out that it does not really matter in the work environment.

Let me give you an example.

Lisa was hired as a personal assistant to Tom. What Tom wanted Lisa to do was to make him more effective by helping him with the admin work. Lisa was happy at first, but gradually she was slowly drawn into helping him do more than admin work. Daily tasks included, helping him to cold call, gather leads, following up with his clients, chasing payments and preparing his power point presentations and etc. She covered almost every aspect of his work. This made Lisa more tired, stressed and over-worked, because she was not working from her strengths. She hated sales and did not like making cold calls.

In the end, she quitted her job and was frustrated in doing everything. The interesting thing was that Tom was also unhappy with Lisa’s performance. He mentioned that “She could not perform.”

A better approach for Tom is to give her a specific Job Description (JD) in HALF A PAGE. Once she is clear, Tom can approach her to do other things that are not within the JD. Only if she can finish the main tasks listed out in the JD, she can proceed to do the other things. Tom mentions that at any point of time Lisa can refuse to do the additional things, simply because it affects her focus in fulfilling her JD. This creates a better WIN-WIN situation, because Lisa is not overwhelmed and able to work effectively, while Tom manages his expectations better. Being Effective sometimes also means refusing to do something if it diverts our attention.

Conclusion

What we do is always more important than How we do things.

Being Efficient does not make us effective. Efficiency is only useful if it is applied to the right things. Perhaps after all this, we can be Efficiently Effective?

You can also engage me to speak on this topic for your staff.

If you like this article, please subscribe to our blog by getting the Free Report on “7 Deadly Secrets to creating a Dynamic and Cohesive Team”. If you have comments, I would love to hear them. Please post them below.

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This is part 2/2 of the continuation in “Get Back 20% of Your Time Lost At Work!”

4. Reduce Meeting Time And Set Clear Objectives For It

Long meetings with no clear objectives are often another potential time waster. It is always essential to have a clear agenda with a specific outcome you want to achieve. Eg, decide on our marketing direction by the end of this meeting or set out a timeline of programs for 2009. If you are clear on the objectives, you tend to stay focused on the topic and avoid wandering off to other issues. It is also wise to set an end time to the meeting. Instead of the usual 1 hr blocks for meeting, decide that its going to be no long than 45 minutes. Then slowly reduce future meetings to just 30min blocks. Reducing meeting durations also trains people to get straight to the point and not wander from topic to topic.

5. Kaizen Approach To The Way You Do Things

How many times do we fall into this trap of busyness and we do not spend enough time to plan and evaluate how to improve things? The Japanese have this “Kaizen” principle, which means Continuous Improvement. This slow, incremental improvement is always observed at all levels of work. If we are too busy, how can we set aside time to evaluate and improve our work processes? In my previous experience working with a manufacturing company, I’ve learnt that if you could improve an operation by just 2 seconds, you literally save thousands of dollars in man hours and machinery cost.

6. Do Not Multi-Task

I know this statement will offend probably many people; however I stand by this rule. Multi-tasking actually makes us feel very rushed and we tend to shorten our attention span on things. This makes us feel rather frustrated and unsettled. Intense multitasking can induce a stress response, an adrenaline rush that when prolonged, can damage cells that form new memory, according to a research study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology by Dr. David Meyer. He mentions that multitasking actually makes a person inefficient. There is time lost between switching among tasks increases with the complexity of the tasks.

The best way approach to doing things is just doing things one thing at a time.

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Believe me, I have been there. I used to think that being busy was extremely important, not till I found out that I was doing a lot of things, but nothing productive was done. In this world of multi-tasking, I asked myself is there something I could do to make myself more effective and yet have more time for myself?

The answer was a resounding YES! It is so simple and you could do it too. Now is the time to do less and yet be more effective. Follow these lessons and you will immediately gain back your lost time!

1. Dispel the Myth of Time Management

There is NO such thing as time management, only self management. We cannot technically manage time, but we can manage ourselves in the way we do things. We have to decide the difference between being productive and being busy. There is no other way.

2. Check your emails only twice a day

Emails are considered to be the most disruptive thing to work in our everyday work. We tend to have this compulsive urge to check out emails almost 20 times a day. When there are no emails, we tend to create them. Some of us even fall into the habit of replying emails thru and fro when it all takes is a phone call to quickly resolve an issue. If there are more than 2 emails replies going out from you, try talking over the phone instead.

My suggestion is to check emails twice a day at 10am and 4pm. This gives you the early morning to plan what you need to do for the whole day. By only checking twice a day, you also tend to clear emails faster than usual.  Doing things in bulk give you momentum and you tend to be more selective in the way you read emails.

3. Avoid taking phone calls as much as possible

Taking phone calls can literally break your momentum when you do things. Have you ever got into the momentum of doing sometime and when the call comes, it just suddenly breaks your concentration? Even during meetings and discussions, phone calls can often disrupt the flow of thoughts and exchanges between colleagues.

Okay, I am going to stop here. Do watch out for the next post. If you like this article, please subscribe to our blog by getting the Free Report on “7 Deadly Secrets to creating a Dynamic and Cohesive Team”. If you have comments, I would love to hear them. Please post them below.

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