You do not want your customers and competitors understanding the power of optimising personal effectiveness

In a services based knowledge economy, you do not want your customers and competitors understanding the power of optimising personal effectiveness.

You want them to be ineffective at organising and managing time and commitment.

If they are ineffective, you can control them! You can sell them more; you can sell at a higher price; and you can outsell them (in the case of competitors).

You don't want your customer or your competitor's management or staff understanding how to make effective decisions, you want them to be easily led by the latest and loudest emergency or offer.

When I say the power of optimised personal effectiveness, I’m referring to this situation:

• Firstly, you and your teams are capable of focusing completely on what you/they are doing at any given moment, and that there is total confidence that what is being done is the most appropriate thing to done at that moment.


• And secondly, you and your teams are ready for anything, i.e. you and your teams can at an instant change direction and handle interruptions.

In contrast, deficiencies in personal effectiveness might be highlighted by one or more of the following:

• You get to the end of the day feeling exhausted and concerned that nothing important was achieved?
• Your e-mail is overflowing and you never find enough time to respond to everything?
• You can’t find the time to finish things properly?
• You never find your own space – you are subject to continual interruption?
• You struggle to let go of or stop thinking about work issues when at home and home issues when at work?
• You find yourself rushing into meetings, missing deadlines, missing key business opportunities or not having sufficient time for important family events?

You are reading this blog right? Are your customers and your competitors reading this blog? Do you understand the art of work, the art of effectively managing and organising your time and commitments? They might!

In reality, if everyone fully understands the best practice in personal effectiveness, everyone makes better decisions, products move quicker, customers are happier because they get the right product or service, and after all, good completion makes us stronger, not complacent.

Getting you and your team using best practices in personal effectiveness

In my opinion, the best practice in personal effectiveness is this:

• Firstly, you are capable of focusing completely on what you are doing at any given moment, and you have total confidence that what you are doing is the most appropriate thing you should be doing at that moment.
• And secondly, you are ready for anything, i.e. you can at an instant change direction and handle interruptions.

Being focused and ready for anything, means you can get more out of your day, complete more of the important things and to do it all stress free.

Ensuring your team understand the best practices in personal effectiveness is simple:

1. Step 1 - Establish a programme to ensure everyone in your team understands the concepts.
2. Step 2 - Engage a business consultant to help you ensure your processes and systems are not getting in the way of optimal performance.

To get you on the path with Step 1, you should contact Next Action Associates and ask them to help you build a programme around education in optimisation (make sure you mention I sent you ;-)).

Next Action Associates can be found here - http://www.next-action.eu/

GTD provides "white spaces"

For those questioning GTD ....

GTD isn’t for everyone - it takes effort to setup and it does take time to really grasp.

For the impatient and those looking for a quick fix, GTD adoption will bear pain.

For the committed and willing, GTD will provide “white spaces”.

For me, “white space” is the slices of time between the mayhem where real and true thinking is done, where solutions become obvious, where ideas are free flowing, and calm and concise action is the norm.