Less but better
I am a great believer that things sometimes happen or come into your life for a reason. This week, for me it was a webinar I was invited onto on Tuesday evening. The webinar was hosted by Staffing Industry Analysts with the speaker Greg McKeown who is an author of a book titled Essentialism: The disciplined pursuit of less.
Greg talked through the challenges all of us face every day. An ever increasing to do list personally and professionally, and a barrage of requests on our time. Sound familiar? It certainly did to me. After all, there I was at 10pm on a Tuesday evening on a webinar hosted live from the US. Greg spoke about the importance in his opinion of asking yourself everyday, “what’s the most important thing I need to do today?”.
There is a lot more to his thinking and recommendations on how to prioritise and select where we choose to invest our time. I have bought the book, it’s on its way and over the coming weeks I will be dipping in and exploring.
The question of where to spend time and how will it ‘move the dial’ in terms of getting even better results is something that I am endlessly curious about. I’m sure many of us are. We will all know somebody in our lives who is relentlessly choosy about what they will and will not spend time on.
Then there are those of us who attempt to do it all, say yes to requests, seek to go faster, whilst having those moments where we might ask ourselves: can we really do it all? …and to the standard that will make us happy and with the right results?
We are in the second month of our first quarter of the financial year. We are up and running, getting some great results, looking ahead to the rest of the year. We are planning, building, hiring, leading, following, learning. We are ambitious and bold.
The Harvey Nash Group is chock full of great people, innovative, challenging. As somebody who willingly admits that when faced with a challenge my inclination is to lean in and take it on, I am challenging myself now to be more choosy. I will really think through where I put my time for the greater good and to achieve better outcomes. It’s an experiment for me, I will happily share how that works out in the coming months.
I see the question of ‘where do I focus my time?’ as a sister question to ‘where can i make incremental gains?’. Incremental gains is the idea that by doing something just a little better, faster, efficiently, an incremental improvement is gained and over time these gains amount to incredible results. It’s what athletes do, Formula 1 teams do, and every smart person should do.
I think marrying these two questions, around focus and incremental gains, is a very powerful way to become more effective.
So, this week amongst other things has brought the opportunity to reflect and consider. I hope that everyone has had the opportunity to have a good week.
As always, as we head towards the weekend I hope that you keep safe and well.