Real Estate
Say No to Good and
Say Yes to Great
By Daryl Wizelman
As the 2012 Olympic Games in London have been drawing near I have been thinking and reflecting on the similarities of training, competing, and succeeding in sports including the Olympics and how that correlates to our business and personal lives.
The area that I keep coming back to is Time and Priority Management. What choices do we make every day with our time that shapes the plan we have made for what we envision in our personal and business lives?
I often ask myself, “How can it be perfect?” By “it” I mean whatever I am working on at the time. It could be my health, relationships, process, systems, and/or my envisioned future. It may be relating to my personal life and/or my business life. I believe in most areas there is tremendous intersection of life and business.
Every day we are faced with choices on how we are going to spend our time. The choices we make both big and small shape the life we create.
As an athlete a specific plan must be created to train and execute against that plan. The same is true for a successful business and successful life. It starts with a vision of how “it” can be perfect. It moves to a plan and finally to measurable results against the plan which hopefully result in the envisioned future becoming reality.
The most important area to master in order to execute against your plan for business or personal success is how what we do with our time. My goal is to be proactive with my time and to determine what I do and when I do it so I can succeed in life and business.
Here are a few tools I use in Time & Priority Management:
- What is my hourly wage? If I work 1,920 hours a year (48 weeks at 40 hours per week) and I divide my gross income by 1,920 it will equate to me hourly wage. Once I know what my time is worth per hour I can review the tasks I am currently performing and pay someone else to perform the tasks that are below my hourly wage. This will enable me to concentrate on;
- Performing the one to three tasks that bring the greatest value to me and/or my organization.
- Performing the one to three tasks that I enjoy the most.
- Time Tracking. At least twice each year I will take two business weeks and track my time in 15 minute increments for those 10 business days. Once those 2 weeks are complete I review my activities and determine what I should continue to do and what tasks I should delegate. This is a discipline that must be addressed over and over again.
- Letting Go. “We must do less to earn more.” I know this may feel counterintuitive to those of us who feel productive when we are busy filling our day with tasks. Sometimes our ego, insecurity or the belief that we can do “it” better than anyone else can derail our productivity and success. In my business life I have had great success finding people who could perform certain tasks as well or better than I could.
- Learn to Say No (Yes). Or as I say almost every day to myself or others, “Say no to the good so we can say yes to the great.” This requires discipline and a strong confidence in ourselves. There are no shortage “good” opportunities but there are only a few “great” opportunities. Being able to decipher between the two is a great talent. It also takes faith or hope. I define hope as something that I want to happening actually happening. If we say no to “good” opportunities with faith and hope we can be ready and open to the “great” opportunities when they present themselves. This is true in our personal lives and in our business lives.
- Schedule Your Day or They Will. If you don’t schedule your priorities into your calendar and commit to that calendar, everyone and everything else around you will. We must learn to be proactive with our time and not reactive. I pretend like it is the last day of work before a vacation. On those days I am the most productive because I know that I have to be. What if we treat every day like that day?
