Many organisations have a customary year-end review where bosses chat with their people to work out plans for the following year.
In the same vein, I spent time this past week with various members of my team to review their progress and their goals, as well as to help them recalibrate for the coming year.
But instead of revisiting their work over the past year from a “targets-met” stand-point, I asked each individual to review if they felt that they were being efficient.
My change this year was founded on self-efficacy, which is an individual's belief in their inherent ability to achieve their goals.
Albert Bandura, one of the most-frequently cited psychologists of all time, and Professor Emeritus of Social Science in Psychology at Stanford University, refers to self-efficacy as a personal judgment of how well you can implement the actions necessary to deal with any situation.
Bandura is also credited as being the originator of the theoretical construct of self-efficacy.
I wanted my team to understand that if they had high self-efficacy, they will be able to put in the right effort to get better results.
Unfortunately for many leaders, and consequently for the organisations they run, the mission to be more effective at work has led to misconceptions about what having a productive workday truly means.
For so many people, being busy is the equivalent of being productive.
This is also why organisations still subscribe to the outdated 8 or 9 hour work- day.
Workers are shackled to this archaic industrial work-force concept of having to be at their work-stations for a non-negotiable number of hours each day.
Many employees themselves get trapped in the fallacy that being very busy is very good.
New York Times columnist Tim Kreider who also authored the book “We Learn Nothing” wrote, “…busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day.”
Therefore for my end of year review with my team this time, I focused on ascertaining if they were actually efficient, or if they were just being busy?
By the end of each discussion, including the one I had with myself (Yes, I do talk to myself often as I find it therapeutic), we all realised that for the most part, we were just busy and not necessarily being efficient.
My quest for myself and the people who work with me is to make 2019 less busy, and more efficient. And, I am happy to share with you the two ideas my team and I agreed to work on for the coming year.
The first is that you have to decide what your highest value tasks are, and to give those the priority they deserve.
Recently, I was in Penang conducting a training programme for a group of managers from one the world’s largest medical and pharmaceutical devices manufacturers. These managers work long hours, and I was tasked at helping them increase their efficiency, and organisational leadership ability.
I asked the twenty five managers attending my course to honestly answer a Pareto Principle inspired survey of their actions. If you haven’t heard of it, the principle asserts that as general rule, 80% of your desired results come from 20% of your work product.
And the results from the exercise, for those who I reckon answered truthfully, matched the common conclusions of this principle.
Busy people feel that the best way to progress is to get more things done in their given number of work-hours. This means they try to fit way too many tasks in their to-do list. Productive people on the other hand know that they need to focus on planning and strategizing their work-day.
My team will now identify 2-3 priority items each day, and concentrate on them. This means they will ensure that they accomplish those tasks that are of the highest value for themselves, and the company.
The second idea that we will concentrate on for 2019, is monotasking.
This is the practice of dedicating yourself to a given task, and minimising interruptions until that task is completed or a predetermined period of time has elapsed.
Many people fool themselves into thinking that they are good at multitasking.
In fact, renowned neuroscientist Earl K. Miller, who is also Professor of Neuroscience at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), argues that people cannot really multitask very well at all, and even when they say they can, they are actually deluding themselves.
Remember that when you do not concentrate, you make mistakes. As a consequence, you then waste more time and energy going back to repair your effort.
In my businesses, much of our work requires focus and depth. And for best results, I realise that concentrated effort with few distractions leads us to a better and a more expedient work product.
For best results in the coming year, I recommend that you too, sit back now and analyse if you are efficient, or just being busy!