What next?

I once listened to a really good business speaker speak to an entire room of business owners and say to them that he was going to tell them how they could get four holidays per year.

There was a really long pause. Everyone leaned in.

And then he said, “go to the travel agent and book them”. So far so obvious!

But what he was really saying was that if we don’t get those things booked into the diary then they are never going to happen. Because there will always be something else to do.

Ok; I know what you’re thinking. The week before the last big holiday you had was so stressful that you spent the first half of the holiday coming down from the adrenaline high and the second half of the holiday worrying about all the things you needed to do when you got back. And let’s not even get started on the week after you got back.

But if it’s your business, it’s easy for work to push everything else out and take over. And it’s even easier to fall back on the skills that got you here in the first place and just do it yourself. First, you start getting in earlier in the morning, then you start leaving late at night, then it’s Saturday morning. And so on.

Of course, somewhere along the line, you build some really good juggling skills.

It is great when you have an organised to do list that you can work your way down methodically all day. But of course, some days you just get loads of emails, phone calls, questions and you must make decisions about what you are going to deal with next.

This is all the sort of stuff that is covered on the time management training that I know many of you have had. But let’s have a little re-cap anyway.

Is it important? Is it urgent?

How much time do you spend in each of the four quadrants i.e.:

1. Urgent and important
2. Important not urgent
3. Urgent not important
4. Not urgent not important

The average person’s time is split roughly as follows:

1. Urgent and important – 30%
2. Important not urgent 10%
3. Urgent not important – 50%
4. Not urgent not important 10%

The elephant in the room of course is why we would spend 10% of our time on things which are not urgent and not important? Because we secretly enjoy them perhaps?

But that’s not the biggest difference between the average person and high achievers, whose time is more like:

• Urgent and important – 10%
• Important not urgent 60%
• Urgent not important – 30%
• Not urgent not important 0%

The basic premise is that because high achievers spend more time on things that are important but not urgent (usually activities that make the business run more efficiently), then as a result less urgent stuff crops up.

But that’s the theory. In the real world, you have to make real decisions and each of us have brains which have been trained to think in a particular way.

It may be that in your work life, the roles that you undertake are primarily focused around deadlines.

As you get better at your role you start to work backwards from those deadlines.

You start to get a good inkling when the volume of work is higher than it should be at a particular time of the month or year. You know how to react to those situations. You know when a project must be started by. You know when its in danger of falling behind.

And then you take on some other responsibilities. But they are not deadline driven. In fact, they are simply based on the profitability of your business or maybe the growth. Classic important but not urgent tasks. The bad news is that you will probably never get around to doing them if your thought process is all based on deadlines.

And besides there are far too many important not urgent tasks that you can do which could fill up your day three or four times over.

You can’t do them all, so if you’ve got lots of urgent not important tasks under your nose, you just get on and do those and then a day goes by and a week and a month and a year later something that was really important but not at all urgent has not been done.

And the implications of that might be that you have had to do lots more work on a particular task because the system change that you needed to make or the training that you needed to undertake or the staffing issue that you needed to resolve never did get sorted then as a consequence you ended up with far more work to do than you would have done otherwise.

It is easy to be wise in hindsight. But how can you be wise in foresight?

To do so requires an understanding of return on investment (ROI).

ROI is a term which is used by people that are buying businesses, or properties or just by business analysts generally. It is asking you to work out return divided by cost as a percentage. 15% might be a good ROI for somebody who is an investor in businesses. It’s a lot better than they would get from a savings or general investment account.

But in your world, there might be something which is a 1000% ROI. There might be something which you could spend an hour on now which would save you 10 hours in the future. That is a 1,000% return.

When you are faced with a long list of things that you could do which are important but not urgent, it is crucial that you consider their ROI. And then you can compare them to some of the other urgent but not important things as well and prioritise based on which ROI is the highest.

Let me give you an example:

Let’s say you have two queries to deal with from customers. Ideally, you should deal with both today. You have also got a member of your team who needs an hour of your time in order to be able to do their work for the rest of their week. You have three things to do, and you only have enough time for two of them. Which do you do?

Well, I can’t answer that, because I don’t know what your return is on any of those things, and I don’t know what your alternatives are.

Let’s say one of the queries is for a fee for £5,000 and the other is a fee for £50. That would probably mean that the £5,000 one would trump the £50 one every day of the week.

Or maybe not. It may be that the £5,000 one is for a customer who is actually quite busy this week and it won’t do any harm to deal with it next week. And the £50 one is for a long-term customer who has been really upset by a particularly trivial item, especially after some mistakes have been made on their work recently.

Suddenly the return on the £50 job is actually bigger than on the £5,000 job. And what about a member of staff that needed some guidance from you?

You may be thinking that the return is avoiding the loss that the company is going to suffer if that person sits around twiddling their thumbs for the rest of the week. And you’d be right. But you might not be the only person who can solve that problem. Perhaps there is another solution.

Perhaps you could ask one of your colleagues if they could undertake the training.

They might not do quite as well as you because they might not have quite the same amount of knowledge. But the difference in performance of the member of staff receiving the training may be quite small. Therefore the return on your time for doing that training is the difference between that person‘s performance if you do the training or that person’s performance if one of your colleagues does the training.

Suddenly the return isn’t quite so big (when compared to the best alternative), is it?

I could give you a million examples of when you have got to compare one project against another but of course you don’t have the time to sit down and analyse all this out on a great big spreadsheet. What you have actually got to do is just have your “to do list” in front of you and make a judgement.

Just like anything else, if you practice this stuff, you get better at it and eventually your instincts take over. After almost 30 years running my accountancy practice, I think I am pretty good judge of what would get the best return on the next hour of my time.

So, whenever you get a visit from that horrible feeling of overwhelm, there is only thing to do. Go to your to do list, delete all the numbers down the side, make sure everything that you are going to do is on that to do list and then put it back into a new order based on return on investment.

And if the thing at the top is not screaming at you to be the thing to do next, think about booking that holiday.