liquidsimplicity

Happy New Year everyone! I hope you had a wonderful Christmas and are feeling all set for 2011!

This is a time of year where pretty much everybody is rethinking their lives, be it personal or professional, and making all sorts of promises to themselves about how they’ll be fitter, slimmer, spend less money, be more efficient, learn a new skill etc, etc.

Whilst all of this is brilliant often we try to take on too much at once. The outcome of this is that we then end up feeling overwhelmed, deprived or we can’t see the changes happening fast enough, so we have a massive blow-out and then quit. Better, perhaps is to use the approach of Kaizen. In it’s most simple explanation, Kaizen means “small, incremental improvements sustained over time”.

An example of this is the person that wants to start jogging. On their first day of jogging (after a long period of time not jogging), they head out and try and run for 20 to 30 minutes. It’s hell, it hurts and the next day they are so sore they can’t think about running again. That’s it, over. The Kaizen approach would say that for day 1, you run 1 minute. Day 2, 2 minutes. Day 3, 3… and so on. By 30 days you’re running that 3o minutes and you will have built up a level of fitness and stamina that’s far more likely to be continued. Plus, a 1 minute run every day is a lot less daunting than trying to run for a half hour right from the start isn’t it? Another huge bonus with this approach is that you will be far more likely to achieve your daily goals. This feels good and will spur you in to the next day. It’s all about breaking it down in to manageable chunks.

A great way to assess where this approach can be applied to in your life / activities is to examine the way you are currently spending your time and efforts versus where you would like them to be. This is referred to as “Current State vs. Desired State”. You can see from the example below that I’ve given an idea of how someone I recently went through this with is dividing their working life. We took a list of all the “tasks” they engage in each working week, and estimated how many hours were spent doing each task. This was based on the average 37.5 hour working week and we then allocated this as a percentage.

As you can see quite clearly that the current state of affairs is that this person is spending a lot of time on emails and admin; and perhaps not enough time selling or seeing their clients. So, we went through what they feel would be a much more desirable way of spending time. Results below:

Interestingly, what this person is currently doing and want they want to be doing is pretty much exactly opposite. They want to spend less time on emails and admin and more time selling and seeing their clients. So, why is this not happening?

In another post about the 10 Tips to Improve Your Work / Life Balance I talked about prioritising and how often we spend too much time doing the things that we don’t want to be doing and not enough doing the things we do. Hopefully this exercise will help to identify how this is split. The examples above are for illustration purposes only and you can download the worksheet here: Current state vs desired state

You don’t have to use the categories we’ve talked through, nor does it need to be about how you spend your working week. You can apply this to fitness goals, how you spend your recreation time, how you are currently allocating marketing activity, anything really, it’s up to you. Once you’ve identified where you currently are and where you want to get to, it’s a lot easier to put a plan of tactics together (maybe even using Kaizen philosophy to do so), in order to reach your goal(s). As the brilliant Stephen Covey says “Start with the end in the mind”… Good luck and if you’d like to discuss any of this, please just get in touch.

More coming soon on planning for effectiveness…

Flickr image by: tableatny