Will being too busy ultimately kill your business?

Theodore Roosevelt once said: “In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.”

In this time of unprecedented change in both the world at large and our small corner of it in the Estate and Letting Agency industry, many are suffering from just this issue of procrastination and who can blame them? With what seems like a brand new ‘game-changing’ app, portal or software appearing almost daily it has left many feeling like a rabbit in the headlights, unsure as to which way to run and therefore staying firmly put.

Not only is the number of new options overwhelming but the number of options to navigate those options is now also becoming a minefield of its own with an entire industry of ‘advisors’ now being created.

Couple all of this with the fact that our industry has been incredibly busy with new business over the past 6 months or more and there is just very little mental space or time to investigate change.

Unfortunately, this is a recipe for disaster on a grand scale.

To quote another President, Eisenhower famously said, “what’s important is seldom urgent, and what’s urgent is seldom important.”

In our everyday business lives, there are always lots of things that scream for our attention. We all have big to-do lists filled with things that need to get done today. Yet there are so many shorter-term issues to address that it seems like there is no time left for strategic reflections.

This simple graph, called the Eisenhower decision matrix, is designed to help you place your tasks into the right boxes, just try not to put everything into the important and urgent box!

Using the Eisenhower Decision Principle, tasks are evaluated using the criteria important/unimportant and urgent/not urgent and then placed in according quadrants in an Eisenhower Matrix, also known as an Eisenhower Box or Eisenhower decision matrix. Tasks in the quadrants are then handled as follows.

1.     Important/Urgent quadrant tasks are done immediately and personally e.g. crises, deadlines, problems.

2.     Important/Not Urgent quadrant tasks get an end date and are done personally, e.g. relationships, planning, recreation.

3.     Unimportant/Urgent quadrant tasks are delegated, e.g. interruptions, meetings, activities.

4.     Unimportant/Not Urgent quadrant tasks are dropped, e.g. time wasters, pleasant activities, trivia.

The secret of course is planning, you need to schedule time for innovation and if you truly do not have time to do that, then you are either under-staffed or lacking in automation. The pull of the ‘urgent, not important’ of routine tasks is just too strong. So if you and everyone around you finds themselves doing simple to automate tasks like qualifying leads, posting content to social, sending follow up emails and registering applicants etc then software like Lifesycle can help.

We have all been caught in the ‘performance engine’ and are fully aware of its pitfalls.

If you find that your daily work conflicts too much with your vision and mission, it's time to take action and re-tune, automate simple processes and plan more time for the important long-term projects, because these are the ones that will help your company to remain relevant in an ever-changing world.