Do you feel like you are always working but not getting anywhere? Are you great at managing your time, highly productive but disappointed that you are achieving the level of success you desire? If so, this post is for you as I will be looking at why you need to stop focusing on being efficient and focus on being effective to achieve long-term success.
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I often talk to women who are frustrated that they haven’t achieved the level of success they desire. They are Type A, hardworking women who in their own words would say they are wonderwoman, yet they see other making big leaps and think why isn’t that happening to me when I am working so hard. I believe a major reason is that these women are highly productive and efficient, but don’t focus enough on being effective.
To me these women are focusing on being efficient – they focus on getting everything done with the time and resources they have, rather than being effective, which is carefully selecting what to do in order to get the best results.
In the book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey shares a time management quadrant that has urgent and not urgent across the top and then important and not important down the side. Most people are rubbish are doing the not urgent activity. We live in a firefighting world and concentrate on urgent, but to be successful you have to make time to focus on the not urgent but important activities.
So how can you focus on being effective. Follow these steps:
1) Work out what things would really help you to be more successful
As I mentioned the not urgent but important tasks rarely even get consider so spend some time getting really clear on what would REALLY help you to make the leaps you want in your life. Maybe you need to get a mentor? Or you need to spend more time nurturing your network? Or you need to finish off a proposal and send it to someone? Or you need to start pitching yourself to the media or to speak at conferences? Or you need to update your LinkedIn? Or there is something you need to learn? Or a course you need to take? In most cases, it will involve you putting in some concerted energy that you probably won’t see the impact for tomorrow, but will have major benefits over the long term.
2) Set aside time for you to action those tasks
Getting into the routine of regularly doing activities that are important for your future is key. So schedule in when you are going to make that time. Maybe you can carve out a small chunk of time every week, or maybe you have a dedicated day or half a day once a month. I know that might out excessive, but this is for those who want to be highly successful professional and that doesn’t happen magically.
3) Get some accountability
Getting accountability is a great way to ensure that you follow through on your intentions. The things about being effective is that it is so easy to forget about in the day to day life. You can feel so accomplished by crossing off all those things on your to-do list and then it is only when you see someone has written an article for a international publication, or spoken at conference, or written a book on the exact topic that you wanted to write a book on that you think “Oh I was meant to do that”.
The type of tasks that make you effective are not going to be the ones people naturally remind you to do. That is why sharing your goals to someone who will hold you accountable is so important. Share your goals and the actions you are going to take. Knowing that there is someone else out there that knows about your goals so hopefully help you to stay on track.
To recap, you need to stop focusing on being efficient, but instead of focusing on being effective. Make a conscious effort to focus on the activities that are really going to make a difference to the level of success you achieve in your life.
