“Don’t mistake movement for achievement. It’s easy to get faked out by being busy.
The questions is: Busy doing what?” – Jim Rohn
Everyday I see entrepreneurs and business owners being busy and I often wonder if they are really being effective. You see being busy and being effective in business are not the same. It’s easy to be busy doing other peoples things or activities that are not driving you towards your dream and goals. As entrepreneurs it is also easy to get seduced by the “bright shining object syndrome” what I affectionately call Entrepreneurial ADD. This results in a lack of focus and engaging in tasks that don’t drive you towards where you want to go. Sure as an business owner you need to be open to all possibilities as opportunities can appear from the least expected places, but when you are not clear on what you want the right opportunities in my experience never show up, just distractions instead.
In his highly acclaimed book on effectiveness, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People“, Dr Steven Covey makes a clear distinction between what is urgent and what is important. Covey outlines a 4-box matrix with Urgent on one axis, and Importance on the other (see the image).
Most people who are feeling like busy fools are making one of two mistakes in respect of Covey’s matrix: they are putting all their effort into completing Urgent tasks, or they are failing to identify the Important ones. Urgent tasks are those that have a deadline approaching, while Important ones are those that get you where you want to go in the longer term.
Covey says we should be spending most of our time in quadrant two – “Urgent AND Important”. And he makes a very important point: if we are dealing with quadrant two items while they are not yet urgent, we should never have anything in quadrant one at all. And where we can get the time to work on quadrant two stuff, to stop it leaking up into quadrant one, is from quadrants three, and particularly quadrant four.
The trick, of course, is to understand whether the “importance” of a task, or a project, or a business, relates to *your* long-term objectives, or those of somebody else. So before you put something to the top of your priority list, make sure you are doing it for you.
Another important distinction to be made here is that as a business owner marketing and sales are always activities that should be in quadrant 2. If you are to avoid the roller coaster of cash flow that many business owners experience you need to ensure consistency in your sales and marketing activities so that you are always working on income generating activities. After all your business won’t survive if you don’t have any customers.
Avoiding being a busy fool means s focusing on these Important and Urgent tasks daily and engaging in income generating activities. Only then will you create a successful business that fuels your dreams and goals, and yet time and time again I witness business owners being busy by finding activities to do that stop them focusing on this quadrant. This is a classic case of procrastination, something we will look at in another article.
So for today, be clear on what you want to achieve and stay focused on this path. Stop being busy doing other peoples things or tasks that don’t lead to your success.
I’d love to hear about what you are focusing on today.
Julia Felton (aka The Business Wrangler) is the founder of Business HorsePower. Business leaders, entrepreneurs and executives hire her to accelerate their business performance by harnessing the energy of their people to work more collaboratively together. By aligning purpose with actions the team achieves exponential results as everyone starts pulling in the same direction.
Julia believes that business is a force for good and through designing purpose-driven businesses that leverage the laws of nature, and the herd, you can create businesses founded on the principles of connection, collaboration and community that make a significant impact in the world.
