The Commitment Review |
It is important to review all the commitments that you choose to make, and a good place to start is to look at everything that you do that is not specifically related to your business. What I mean by that is activities that involve meetings or events outside the office that are not directly connected to everyday work issues. The list will comprise, but not be limited to such activities as:
Develop the list on an Excel spreadsheet and include everything you do that involves any kind of meeting or event. Be sure to list everything whether they are business related or personal commitments that you have made that involve meetings or events outside of business hours. Then create two columns to identify whether the activities are business or personal. If they are both business and personal, then put an X in both columns. You will also need a column to identify the number of hours that you spent on each activity over the last 12 months. This should include not only the time actually spent in meetings or at events, but also any time spent preparing, telephone or e-mail communications, and any follow-up work that is necessary. You may be surprised by the results here! The next step is to create columns to record the benefit that you have received from each activity during the last 12 months. In identifying the benefit, you will need to think of it in terms of dollars for business related activities, and the column to do this will be headed "benefit $". This does not work for activities that are in the personal column as things that are strictly personal may have a value related to children, political interests, spiritual interests and a whole variety of other things. If some of the things that you do give you tremendous satisfaction then obviously they are not likely to be things that should be eliminated from your calendar. The best way to handle this is to create a "benefit rank" where you empirically identify on a scale of 1 to 10 the non-financial value that you get from each activity. Click here for a template of The Commitment Review worksheet. Once the spreadsheet has been completed, you are in a position to sort it by any column to come up with a meaningful analysis. You might want to sort it initially between business and personal and then look at the relationship between the amount of time that you spend on the activity and the benefit that you receive, whether financial or in some other dimension. The results of this exercise can be very telling. You don't have to do anything immediately with the information, but the ranking should identify for you those things that you really do need to eliminate from your day at some point.... whether now or in the future. The final step in this analysis process is to create a written plan for each activity that you want to eliminate.
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Most people have a “To Do” list to record the tasks they need to "Get Done", but it doesn't help identify what you shouldn't do yourself. For that you need a “To Don’t” list. Identify the culprits, put them on the list and defend your time by assigning them elsewhere. |