Let’s take back control of the really important activities

Let us stop and think: the way we predominantly work, which is now also becoming the way we conduct much of our lives, does not put us in a position to understand the extent to which we are producing results, for ourselves and our companies. We are definitely losing sight of the ability to commensurate activities performed and impacts achieved. We spend, without realizing it, hours and hours looking at e-mails, the web, or in endless discussions and meetings, only to be reduced to making very important decisions in a few minutes, even putting them off until the next day, because we are now exhausted, complaining punctually that we had little time to do the “real” work.

We superficially distribute our time with little awareness of the fact that time consumed for any activity no longer returns to our possession. It is gone forever. Inexorably.

When I touch on this issue in companies, I realize that I am putting my finger on a sore spot that people find out is really huge. It is as if they have bought a fantastic and expensive automatic machine for a production department and do not know how to answer the question about its actual use. Or, it is as if when asked about the utilization in hours of a machine, they answered, 8, 10 or 12 hours, but without knowing exactly how many good parts it produced.

“Yes, something produced, but we cannot say exactly how many or even how many times the machine stopped or how many times it slowed down its production cycle.” In essence, the company would not know how to say anything about what in management terms is called O.E.E. – Overall Equipment Effectiveness. As a result, it would not know how to tell whether the investment made with the purchase of the machine is having a return or not.

That would be unthinkable wouldn’t it?

In almost every company, efforts are made to monitor the efficiency and effectiveness of plant and machinery, but when faced with the utilization and enhancement of the enormous human assets at hand, little is really known about the utilization of the existing potential and the real human efficiency with which they are working. So much for the neo-business gurus and all the ready-to-wear consultants who carry and popularize the myth of the “person at the center”!

Let’s take back control of the really important activities

Where can we start to solve the problem I have outlined? From the clear identification of what I have called “Gold Activities” or those activities that add the most value to ourselves and our business. One will recognize the similarity with the cardinal principle of Lean Thinking: always start from recognizing value for the customer in the flow of activities performed. The difficulty when moving from business processes to individual people processes is that we have to learn to avoid all the pitfalls that prevent us from recognizing what brings the most value, resisting distractions of various kinds and overcoming numerous obstacles along the way. Human beings are not machines that can be regulated and do not move by following workflows that can be predetermined at the desk.

Our mind works like a movie camera that records only what it observes and everything else does not matter. When we focus on so many different things, most of them from sources outside of us, we helplessly witness a theft of our precious attention, and we lose awareness of the fact that we no longer recognize the things that are most important to us.

To sum up, our ability to focus is potentially very strong, but really limited, and it is by no means a given that everything we put our attention on is the most important thing for us, our company, and our loved ones.

Take action: train the “muscle” of focus

Focus is like a muscle; if we don’t train it constantly, it gets quite weak. To be trained, the focus muscle needs a key ingredient: intentionality. So in our case it would be more correct to talk about intentional focus. And since most sources of focus are currently external sources (e-mails, colleagues, chats, social networks, meetings, interruptions) unfortunately, intentional focus is already weakened in most business contexts.

We increasingly live in a rampant state of hyperreactivity to external stimuli. Indeed, we become increasingly good at reacting quickly to these external stimuli, at the same time weakening our intentional concentration skills. This leads to a loss of awareness of the impact-activity relationship: for example, if we are involved almost simultaneously in four activities with completely different impacts on our business, our poor brains cannot easily distinguish the differences in importance. A trivial e-mail will occupy the same time, attention and energy as a project with a possible million-dollar impact for our business. Everything, then, becomes of equal importance, or rather nothing becomes substantially more important than anything else. In many cases, this flattening process does not allow us to observe and choose high value-added activities that we could, and in some cases should, do and instead do not. We encounter true “equivalent blindness.” We miss valuable opportunities for ourselves and others.

The flattening of relevance levels ultimately turns out to be one of the behavioral biases encountered in business today. In doing so, one easily risks losing value, time and energy. Every day.

A Gold Activity is, in essence, a fast track to value creation. One can do many things every day, but only through these activities will I travel the fastest path to effectively achieve personal excellence. Each of us should always know-or should find out as quickly as possible-what our Gold Activities are for achieving the best in ourselves or our group.

You don’t become excellent by doing everything

You don’t grow by reading as much e-mail as you can or by zeroing out your e-mail inbox, as we may have been taught in some time management course. We need to distinguish service activities from value-added activities, necessary activities from those that represent waste for whoever does them, and, most importantly, we need to identify the activities that done by us represent absolute waste.

Gold Activities also allow us to take a strategic view and not end up with “our heads in the sand” dealing with tactical things every day. A person focused on seeking his or her Gold Activities will succeed in integrating the team more and more because he or she will have to choose what to do personally and what to delegate to others, consequently forcing the integration needed to manage and monitor the delegated activities. The pursuit of the essential naturally leads to the elimination of the superfluous, simultaneously reducing stress and waste.

Being focused on the activities that we do excellently and that lead us toward excellence enables us to achieve extraordinary results. When we don’t, unfortunately, we create high levels of stress and slowly drag ourselves into a true state of exhaustion.