Santayana’s Blog

Let’s ask ourselves the slightly disrespectful question, “so what?”  If the path to hell is paved with good intentions, you will find, if you look closely at that path, that those good intentions are neatly arranged in a “To do list” format.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe in planning. Planning is a key to success but used wrongly it is also a cause of delusional thinking. At the end of the day, you completed your to do list. All those items checked off and finished! What a good feeling, now you can sleep in peace. Are you sure your list adds up to a hill of beans?

At the end of the day when we review the many completed tasks, let’s ask ourselves the question “So what?”  What results come from your activity? What would happen if you left these tasks undone, delayed or delegated?  Did you do the most important and highest return activities for this day?

Try this exercise; in a journal format, write out your completed projects that you accomplished on this day. Then, do this potentially painful self examination: was this what really needed to get done?  Was this the best and highest use of your time for this day? Is your intense and disciplined work to complete your list masking cowardice and avoidance regarding high risk, high return items? What is behind the façade of carefully orchestrated busyness? Ask yourself “so what” and when you get a satisfactory answer that money was made, relationships mended, performance improved, profit generated, costs cut, then you can be at peace, at least until tomorrow.

There are some basics that might seem so simple that they have not really been codified into any model or theory and below I will review a couple of them:

Perception of role- Sit down with the client or end user of Training and informally ask them what they believe is the role of training. The answer will tell you a great deal.

Perception of performance- Ask for examples of when training has played a role in the achievement or non achievement of some goals. Again, note the answer.

Expectation Gap- Carefully assesses the difference between what trainings role and contribution is and what it could be.

Remember, you are not discarding all your tools for analysis, design, development, implementation or evaluation. You are not discarding Kirkpatricks levels of measurement or the application of system thinking to the evolution of the learning organization. All I am asking is that you spend a few minutes asking several key executives some basic questions.

What they think training should do and what they think training has done. Even if they have never given it much thought, the answers will tell a lot about the work you have ahead of you.  Expectations are a powerful shaper of behavior and unless you know the direction of this strong undertow you will not have a

handle on the currents tugging at the strategic design and direction of Learning in your organization.

The most dangerous thing you can do in difficult times is to worry about things you can not control. Unless it is your job to do so, you will accomplish little by thinking about the government, corporate greed, conspiracies, mass stupidity, our broken education, health, prisons and banking systems and on and on. Instead, focus on yourself and honestly assess what you can do here and now each day. Have the humility and simplicity to work on those things and your progress will be great. Remember, as Tolkien said, ”little by little one travels far”.

Own a mirror? There is a friend there. There is also an enemy. He is your “frenemy”. He can help you with the truth or distract you with lies. There is an old saying that “the truth that hurts and later heals is better than the lie that comforts and later kills”. Here are some simple things to do to avoid delusions and the fruitless efforts they produce:

Analyze- Socrates said at his trial “A life unexamined is not worth living”.  Make an inventory of your most pressing problems. List all the problems you can think of and then highlight the ones you can do something about. If your budget and headcount has been cut, that may be a given to work with rather than a problem to solve. Forget about what is out of your control for now.

Prioritize- Start with the one highest return, biggest impact problem that you can influence.

Nurture your creativity- Pick one problem and schedule ten minutes of quiet time to yourself to brainstorm solutions on paper. Write a list of twenty possible actions on a notepad as quickly as you can. If you have a team, involve them. Do not monitor yourself at this stage, simply write as quickly as you can and list twenty actions. Then go back and begin writing your plan. Your first step will likely come from this list.  

Journaling keeps you grounded in reality- Have you noticed how many successful people keep journals? After Watergate, many advisors tried to get elected officials to cut down on their journals because of the certainty of the logs getting subpoenaed if there was a problem but journaling among the successful has only increased since then. While you work on the above selected problem, document all progress and the lack of progress as well.

A two minute version of this habit that is just as helpful is a “Progress Log”. Buy a simple notebook and jot down everything you have accomplished each day. Write the date at the top of each page and jot down four or five activities undertaken for each day. They can be trivial such as, “called three vendors and requested bids” or significant such as “met with CEO at ABC and received a letter of introduction to the CEO at his sister company”. The idea is to log progress and stay grounded in reality. This habit combats the tendency to fall into delusions that lead to either cockiness or despair. Either trap is a can ruin your career, business or family. For many, to do lists are requirements for organization and success. I use them myself. But a log is just as important. Keep your log in the same place and fill it at the same time each day. Your desk or night table, the morning or the evening, it does not matter as long as you are consistent. Your log will help you form the habit or introspection, analysis and documentation.  

Work on what you can control. Attack one problem at a time with creativity and you log your progress. This will provide you with the assuring confidence that you have done all you can and all that you should.

More than success, your peace of mind is well worth these modest changes in your habits.

Doing more with less is one of those things we hear when money is tight, headcount is down and fear is in the air; in other words, current economic conditions. But is it an empty cliché or a realistic response to pressure to improve the return on our efforts?

If you think you can do more with less, then there is a realistic question headed your way. Why didn’t you do it before? No, there is more to it than working harder or even working smarter. Let’s examine the nature of return on effort in our work and how we can improve it.

Assuming you are an intelligent and hard working person, you are probably already doing a credible job of working effectively and efficiently. So where is the room for improvement? Lets look a simple checklist:

1. Do less with the Pareto principle- The 80/20 rule states that 20% of activities produce 80% of results. We are often too busy to analyze our work enough to understand what part of our day produces what results. When our back is to the wall because headcount, budget and support resources have been cut, instead of “dancing faster”, we need to stop everything and take time to analyze our use of time and what results are produced by each project. To do more with less, you may have to begin by doing less. Focus on high return activities and prune away the rest.
2. Delay work until you can do some planning- The story says that if you have 24 hours to do something, take the first hour to plan the next 23. More effort is wasted, not from procrastination but because we do not stop to think and plan.
3. Slow down- The more pressure we are under, the faster we go and the more errors occur. Speeding up often leads to losing control of our focus, distractions increase, relationships are damaged and work has to be repeated. Worse of all, undoing mistakes often costs more resources than doing the project from start to finish at a calm pace.

So, paradoxically, to get more done you may need to do less, delay starting so you can plan thoroughly and try hard to slow down. Just don’t tell your boss how you achieved your results because this may not be the time to be bragging about doing less, delaying and working more slowly regardless of how excellent your results are.