Act On the Important
In today’s fast paced construction world, everything seems to be both urgent and important. When you have a lot to do, determining where your “big rocks” are is key to being successful.
Watch Digging Deeper this week as Dennis talks about the importance of prioritizing, checklists, and periods of uninterrupted time in getting your most important things done in a timely manner. We look forward to hearing your thoughts and comments.
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Good morning, everybody. Dennis Engelbrecht with the Family Business Institute and our pod series, Digging Deeper.
During one of our recent peer groups we put on the agenda book sharing. So, everybody brought a book and the lessons
they've learned from that book. And really found that to be a great learning experience, some of the lessons that came
through there. So, one of the things I heard, one of the lessons that came out of there was to act on the important.
So, I thought about that in terms of construction and where project managers, and superintendents often are. And we're
bombarded with so much information, email, texts, and it's really hard to stay organized, keep your arms around
everything that has to be done and remain effective. And I thought, that's really one very simple tip, that if we could just
keep it in mind on a daily basis, could help us get organized and get things done.
So again, the tip is to act on the important. And what I was thinking of, I was thinking of the opposite. If you don't want to
be very good at your job in construction, procrastinate, right? Put things off. If you don't want to be very good, that's
probably the clearest straight line to being ineffective and losing your job in construction, is to procrastinate on things.
And the reason for that is pretty simple, I think. Most everything in a construction timeline has to be done on a timely
basis. Urgency is very important, but we also can't get lost in the urgent so that we neglect the important.
So, what are some of the reasons that we do procrastinate? Sometimes it may be that we're not very organized. So, make
sure that you are organized, make sure that you have a system for organization. Another just quote that I heard during
the course of this round table on books that people read was to schedule your big rocks. So big rocks kind of comes from
the EOS system. Those are your big goals, the things that you're thinking of. So, schedule your big rocks, schedule those
things that are important. But put a time frame, close your door or, make it known that you're concentrating. Don't look
at your email or answer your phone during those times so that you can get those important things done.
Some of you will start each day with a to-do list. A to-do list is terrific, as long as you prioritize that. So again, prioritizing
means recognizing what's truly important, and then acting on that again. Again, one of the challenges we have today,
probably more so than anything in staying on task, is really the internet. We start down, whether it's our email or just
researching something on the internet or finding a piece of information which can be done very efficiently on the internet.
But it also can send us down a wormhole where we see one piece of information, now we're reading in detail another
piece of information. And before you know it, we've lost five or 10 good minutes.
And again, and the important things tend to suffer in that exercise. So how you organize yourself day to day, how you
recognize, and differentiate between what's urgent, what's important, and truly what's not important, that's going to be
a big, big determiner of your success as a project manager or a superintendent. So again, really keep this in mind and start
every day with the idea that you're going to act on the important. Thanks for tuning it.
