IS Everything you do each Day, the Most Effective Use of Your Time

If we all have the same amount of time each day, how is it possible that some people get so much more done each day than others? When you discover the answer to this question, you will have unlocked the secret to invite almost any level of success into your life. You will be able to enjoy the same success, which you admire in the top performers all around you. The simple secret for accelerating your success and giving you many extra hours each day to focus on doing the most important things is “PRIORITISATION”. When you stop spinning your wheels and you focus all your energy on the most important things every day, you stop being just feeling busy and you become productive, effective and efficient.

Any great leader knows that busyness is not effectiveness or efficiency and that activity is not achievement. If you want to be effective as a leader it is crucial that you invest time to research all the things that are consuming your time each day. If any of those activities are not the most effective and efficient use of your time, then it is time for a massive shake-up. It is time to discover what will bring the best results and to focus all your energy and time on only those activities each day.

Prioritisation is the reason Richard Branson is able to manage hundreds of companies, why Donald Trump manages to earn Billions of dollars a year and why any leader achieves greatness. When you make the decision to finally shake your life up, where you escape from your comfort zone and choose to live according to your priorities, you stop the cycle of busyness and you enter a realm of productivity. The challenge any great leader faces, is managing the pain associated with prioritisation. You may have become so accustomed to your daily routine and enjoy doing some of the unimportant tasks, which feel good to do, but waste buckets of your time every day. So the thought of delegating some of those things you love doing to others, may seem difficult at first. Prioritisation requires leaders to continually think ahead and to constantly evaluate their daily activities. To ensure that, these are the best use of their available time and that everything they do is aligned with the overall vision of the team or organisation.

I know the pain associated with prioritisation from personal experience. I live on the eastern side of Johannesburg and love living there, as I feel very comfortable and familiar in the area. This choice costs me about five hours a week in travelling time, as most of the meetings I attend are in the Northern side of Johannesburg. Although I love living and working in the East. It makes far more sense for me to move my business and home to the North of Johannesburg. This shift of priority will save me about five hours a week and allow me to be far more effective. This move will be a painful, but very necessary one, if I want to move my business to the next level.

If you want to become a great leader it is crucial that you constantly evaluate your priorities and see where you should be investing your efforts. Every year I invest about two weeks in December into designing my year. During this time I carefully look at my schedule from the previous year. I try to evaluate and see whether, everything I did was the best use of my time. I effectively use the previous year as a yardstick to try to see how I can do things better during the next year. I evaluate my commitments to work and family and try to balance these out as best as I possibly can. This then gives me a broad outline of the time I will allocate to work and other areas of prioritisation. The final step in evaluating and defining my priorities, is driven by my vision and goals for the next year. I explore the big picture and try to discover all the tasks, which I must do each day and work to eliminate all the tasks, which just waste my time and force me to spin my wheels.

Once you have built the foundation for your activities during the following year and you know what your priorities should be, move onto the final phase, where you evaluate the individual activities to see if they will deliver the outcomes you want.

Look at the priorities you have identified and ask yourself these few simple questions:

•Is this task really the most productive use of my time and is there really no one else that can do this task as well or better than me?
•Is this task allowing me to utilise my greatest strengths?
•Is carrying out this task going to frustrate or empower me?

When you evaluate your priorities by answering the questions above, it is important to know, that to become a great leader you must pull yourself out of your comfort zone but never pull yourself out of your strength zone. Explore all your priorities and if some of them are crucial, but not aligned with your strength zone or not necessarily the best use of your time, have the foresight to delegate them to someone else. We are always far more effective, when we are doing something we love, so always try to avoid including priorities in your schedule, where you are required to do things you do not enjoy doing.

You can never prioritise effectively, unless you know what your strengths are. Invest the time to evaluate and discover your strength zone. Armed with this information, you can examine all your priorities, which you carry out each day and see if they are aligned with your strengths. It is the responsibility of any leader to make decisions based on priorities. As you learn the art of prioritisation and you gradually eliminate all the time wasting activities from your life and you focus all your energy on only activities that give the best return on your time. You will see remarkable improvements in your efficiency, effectiveness and productivity.

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