Balancing my time between different priorities at hand and my productive capacity sometimes seems like manipulating the audio controls of a sophisticated equipment to achieve the best combination that produces a pleasant, clear and harmonious sound.
Not tuning our priorities well often puts us at risk that range from not fulfilling, to fulfilling with great personal sacrifice and sometimes even health.
➡ First, I have to keep in mind that my physical, mental and intellectual capacities have limits and therefore, it is not feasible to work for long hours for several weeks to the point of exhausting myself so much that I have to stop working for other weeks and not achieve the desired productivity.
➡ Then the demands of our company come into this panorama, such as customer service levels, quality parameters and metrics of the unit in which we work.
➡ And as if that were not enough, the market numbers that qualify us as a profitable and valuable company, the external threat that seems to demand everything from us NOW.
And NOW, it doesn’t exist: it just happened! So, how do we handle ourselves to comply with everything? How do we shape our environment?
No doubt, the harmony between the three variables that I establish in our imagination (us, our company and the environment) would be ideal to keep us in action, complying and above all, satisfied. And the lack of harmony does make us uneasy and often leads us to undesired results or worse, to achieving business and market results at the expense of our life balance.
What can we do? The remedy is not infallible. But we can make conscious reflections of our moment, our capacity and what we must comply with, day by day and week by week.
Here are some recommendations:
What response times do the tasks I have in my hand today require? How have I negotiated them? Not having clear agreements with my colleagues, suppliers or clients leads me to put unnecessary pressure on myself, creating my own anxiety or to postpone a task that deserved to skip the priorities of my pending tasks, affecting the results of my team.
What activities generate value today, for the objectives I have for this week? I should move forward on a couple of them. This adds to my satisfaction for the day.
What activities should I do to contribute to the professional development and work of others on my team? These should be scheduled in advance and with each person, according to the frequency required, making a balance of impact / urgency / capacity of the person. Not all people and tasks need the same frequency and type of follow-up and the good use of the time that we both do depends on a correct assessment that we make together of the above.
What activities of my own require the assignment of specific moments in the agenda? These can go to the list of pending tasks that I must review daily to gradually include them in my daily plan. Or I can schedule them according to their urgency and the impact they deserve within my objectives.
What activities are not within my responsibility or competence? I must hand these over as soon as possible to someone who does have influence over them. It is as much a responsibility to the group to hand them over so that they flow, as it is to ourselves, so as not to be overloaded with the emotions of not making progress on something that does not concern us.
There are many factors to consider when assigning priorities to our activities. For this reason, awareness and timely decision about when to do them according to the value they add to the objectives and according to our response capacity, allows us to tune into the appropriate frequency to achieve the best result with the greatest satisfaction.
As I said before, we are not faced with magic formulas, but if we practice what is suggested with discipline, we advance in the conquest of our results with greater satisfaction.