Black Belt Productivity

Since Jason is en route back to Alabama today, I will try to take a stab at the Leadership post for the week. Now he has read (and posted) farther ahead than I am in Maxwell’s The 360° Leader. So I will drop back a bit to a section that I thought a lot about since I read it.

In Lead-Up Principle #1: Lead Yourself Exceptionally Well, Maxwell lays out 7 areas of your life that you really need to self-manage. The third area is managing your priorities. In it he states that good leaders are “generalists,” “they know a lot about a lot of things.” I think that this falls in line with other premises in the book about having a good broad knowledge of the company that you are working for, not just your role in the company, or its bottom line. He says that as good managers, you should be able to focus your energy in the following way:

• 80% of your time to work where you are strongest
• 15% of your time to work where you are learning
• 5% of your time to work in other necessary areas

This formula has really opened my eyes into planning out my days lately. I am now trying to focus my days on Windows networking and leaving the project planning to a secondary portion of the day. I was trying to get the planning done as one of my main functions for each day and was constantly hitting my head against a brick wall. Now this may mean that the projects that are getting planned may take a little longer to see to completion, but I feel confident that they will be planned better. Hopefully, when they are complete, my planning skills will be a bit stronger and not as time consuming as they currently seem to be.

PS: I was able to finish my Mind Sweep and was able to cull out 4 pages (handwritten) of dump material. One of my next projects is going to be to create a Mind Sweep map that will assist in dumping your psychic RAM. I was able to get a copy of Dr. Pascal Venier’s GTD map and Priorities map [vertical horizon]. They are both well thought out and excellent reference maps that everyone should look at. I am going to try to take some bits from his maps to create the Mind Sweep map.
Hope that everyone has a great weekend.

- Michael