Business Insight Zone

The goal of vacation is to come back to your normal life with new eyes. I’ve been thinking about this today, since this was my first day back in the office after ten days spent with friends and family way up in the North Woods. My refreshed eyes have allowed me to see better what I’ve been aiming for — wittingly or unwittingly — with my existing work routines.

All the work you could do is like a big target.

There are many interesting things in that target’s outer rings. You could, for instance, start from this post, use the search box in the sidebar, and spend the next hour finding items worth reading just on this one blog. (I’m not making any special claims for quality, but with more than 1,100 posts here, you’re sure to find something you’d like in the archives.) But as much as I’d love for you to do that, it probably wouldn’t be the very best use of your working time.

The best uses of your time are right at the bullseye of the target. That’s the sweet spot for your job, your career, or your company — the stuff that makes you stand out.

You only have a few arrows in your quiver.

These are the hours of your day. By being very efficient, you might get a couple of extra arrows in a day, but not dozens more.

Given the limited supply of arrows, you’re best served to aim right at the center. For me, this means re-focusing my efforts around some simple-but-difficult guiding questions:

• What serves the customer most directly?
• What attracts new customers most directly?
• What builds the value of the enterprise most directly?
• What saves us money most directly?

I keep repeating “most directly” because it’s easy to do things that bear tangentially or indirectly on these questions . . . but these things live in the outer rings of the target.

This economy encourages focus.

As I talk with people — within our own walls, among our customers, in the business world at large — I hear over and over that this economy has focused lots of folks’ minds on what’s really important to their businesses. Even mediocre businesspeople are doing what the good ones do in all economic weather by re-evaluating all of their business activities for how close they are to the bullseye.

Improve your aim.

Recently my friend Dan Markovitz, who’s an expert on Toyota-style Lean management, asked “How Lean Is Your Own Behavior?” It’s one thing to set up processes and teams to instill Lean principles into an organization; it’s something else — something harder — to apply those same lessons to yourself.

Today was a day of applying those lessons for me, or maybe I should say it was a day of running smack into them. On a day like today — coming back to an overflowing inbox and RSS reader — it’s easy to see where tasks get tangled up in processes, and where processes bog down around particular tasks.

The hard part is making the changes that need making — old habits die hard — but in the end you get what you aim at.

With this day under my belt, and with the fresh perspective of 10 days of vacation, I can see better what I’ve been aiming at, and what I need to aim at instead.

Are you putting your arrows close to the center of the target?

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Photo by Joe Hagan, used under a Creative Commons license.

Category: Economics, Productivity, The working life