Looking back, you will never regret having invested in yourself today rather than a year or two years from now. The sooner you start, the better because you are your best investment, and use your time and resources.
Organization is what guarantees that you will move forward and complete the projects you have set out for yourself, and it makes it easy, surprisingly, once you have the right schedule for yourself.
We do not have unlimited time for our projects, so taking the time to regroup and learn before taking on a new phase or project is invaluable. You will inevitably have learned much along the way, so take the time to reassess. Your next project will be that much more successful because of those lessons.
If we are growing as business leaders, I guarantee we will be making mistakes. If we knew everything about what we are doing and could do it perfectly, we would not grow.
Although reaching our goals can be so satisfying, the real gold is in making our projects enjoyable. We will be more likely to engage with them, and the time we spend working will be more fun.
Sometimes, as much as we would like the opposite to be true, projects, new initiatives, and ideas take time.
Try the Eisenhower Matrix to organize your to-do list, and you will start working on your priorities. You will feel like you are gaining ground on what is most important for you.
Other times, however, the opportunity is too great to miss out on, and after analyzing it carefully, you will know it is the right choice for you; you’ll then feel confident to invest time and money on it.
Implementing new ideas is not always easy. Sometimes we arrive with the best intentions at a new company and want to introduce many innovations, but we may come face-to-face with entrenched patterns within an organization. Even in organizations that we have led for some time, we might find resistance when we try to institute new practices.
Whether you wish to implement a company intranet, a new business process management system, or the use of objectives and key results in your company, you may face friction. This occurrence is normal, especially if it is not a solution to an existing problem but rather improvement. Having to learn a new tool or information system takes additional time on top of daily procedures.
As managers, much of our daily work is problem-solving – going from one issue to the next and resolving each one. We need to approve transactions or discuss with others how to proceed with a question. This type of work requires being able to solve one task at a time and think on our feet. It may also require building consensus and teamwork. It is dynamic work and is full of activity.
There are other times, though, when we need to do a more intense kind of work. Sometimes we must do a deep-dive and research a new topic. We may have to think through an entrenched problem or start and engage with a challenging project that requires concentrated attention. Here, a different type of performance is necessary: one in which we take the time to immerse ourselves in an issue and think through it.