By Michael Gidlewski
Being successful is not about how hard you work, or how many hours you work. It is about how smart you work. And being a business owner in the 21st century, your key to success will absolutely be to work smarter.
“If you do what you always did, you’ll get what you always got” is certainly one of the most quoted expressions I’ve ever heard. Yet we live in a world that is moving faster forward in every area of our lives and our businesses, so that old saying is no longer valid. There’s no standing still in life: You’re growing or dying; you’re moving up or down the escalator of life.
The only constant in life truly seems to be change. It seems we never have enough time in the day to keep up with what changes, and our ability to manage that change will directly relate to how successful we’ll be. So, today, we need to learn to work smarter, not harder, to harness more of our potential to break through our ceiling of complexity.
A common theme I hear from business owners is “I just don’t have enough time in the day for (fill in the blank).” Management guru Peter Drucker said that time is the most valuable resource. When you think about it, we all have the same 24 hours a day as everyone else. The street person or the CEO of a Fortune 500 company has the same amount of time a day to do with what they want.
Time is the only resource we all have been given equally, and it’s renewable at the start of every day. But it’s not really a time management issue. You can’t manage or control time; you can only manage yourself and how you spend your time. It’s about taking personal responsibility for the results you get in your life and your business. It’s about being crystal clear on the goals for your business and making sure all of our daily energy and resources are put into accomplishing those goals.
It’s not the hours you put in your business that count; it’s what you put in those hours that counts. There is a big difference between activity and the results from that activity. It’s not about working longer and harder; it’s about focusing on the few critical activities that will drive your business to a maximum level of success.
This century, as change continues to pick up speed, it will be more important than ever before to be focused on the outcomes we want to reach. Paul J. Meyer of Success Motivation Institute (SMI) said, “If you’re not making the progress you’d like to make and are capable of making, it’s because your goals are not clearly defined.”
Your effectiveness and time utilization, more than any other single factor, will determine your success and the success of your organization. Where we talk about effectiveness, we are saying that you “do the right things and do them in order of priority.” In other words, work on those high pay-off activities, those five or six activities that produce for your organization and simplify, eliminate, or delegate all other activities that get in your way.
As a business owner, you bring very special talents and abilities to the table and you want to spend your time, energy, and effort on those results producing activities. You cannot spend time proactively planning and looking for opportunities if you are constantly fighting fires all day long. The key to being more effective is defining and working on your most important activities to accomplish your goals and eliminating all non-productive and unimportant activities, no matter how urgent they may appear to be.
Without crystal-clear, significant goals in front of us all the time, you can fall prey to the hundreds of urgent, unimportant, time-wasting activities that gnaw at us all.
_________
Michael Gidlewski is President of West Chester-based Achievement Unlimited, Inc., as well as a growth catalyst and motivational speaker. He works with motivated business owners and entrepreneurs to clearly define the elements of what they dearly want their businesses and lives to look like, then helps them connect all the moving parts that make up those visions to consistent action and habits. Michael can be reached at 610-793-6609 or via e-mail at [email protected].
[uam_ad id=”80503″]
.
[uam_ad id=”80502″]
