Our buddy Kevin Skarritt flagged this post about “Managing urgencies” by Seth Godin for his staff and strategic allies recently, and wanted to hear everyone’s insights on it.

Godin’s solution for making sure you keep your focus on your goal, rather than the fires you have to put out in your business, is this:

I guess the trick is to make the long term items even more urgent than today’s emergencies. Break them into steps and give them deadlines. Measure your people on what they did today in support of where you need to be next month.

Ah…but how do you make your long-term items more urgent?

In the corporate world, managers can make the long-term goals more important for their employees by tying those goals to performance reviews, bonuses, salary boosts, and so on.

But what about the lifestyle entrepreneur? The solo professional? The micro-enterprise or small business owner?

Variations on the “How do you make your long-term items more urgent?” question have launched a thousand careers. From business coaches to motivational experts, helping people achieve their goals is a multi-billion-dollar business, and the success stories - no knock against any of them, it’s just life - requires a “results not typical” disclaimer.

In the face of so many people, with so much more experience, I’m not going to presume that I have the revolutionary answer to this question, the one that would make Epiphanies, Inc. become the be-all, end-all of personal motivation.

What I can tell you is that I made one small change, and it’s made a world of difference for me.

We have a number of clients, and I have a weekly to-do list for them. I draw my daily to-do items from that, and work in any “urgent” stuff as need be.

Previously, I used to put the to-do items for our own business at the bottom of lists. In 2008, I started putting them at the top.

Three months later:

• I’ve blogged much more for our business this year than I did over the same period last year.
• I’ve produced more articles.
• I’ve gotten our information products onto our website and available for sale (after a year of having them created).
• I’ve had more sales and lead-generation conversations than I did all last year.

In other words, I’ve become more of a business owner working on our business, rather than just being a technician working in our business.

Ultimately, trying different things until one stuck has helped in making the right things urgent. It’s not perfect - there are still things on which I need/wish/want to prioritize for our business - but I’m headed in the right direction, finally.

Posted in Dances With Gurus, Insight + Action, Lessons Learned |

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 at 12:44 pm and is filed under Dances With Gurus, Insight + Action, Lessons Learned. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.