Take the rest of the week off, and don’t show up again until Monday afternoon!!

Are you serious?

I am, with this reservation:-

Use the 80 – 20 principle

O.K. I confess, you won’t be able to take off any time soon, there’s too much to do in the short run. Your business or career could collapse.

Let’s set the days off out there as a reward for doing what I will suggest.

I base my comments on the work of 4 of the clearest thinkers in the 20th Century, Wilfredo Pareto, Joseph Juran, Stephen Covey and Michael Gerber.

O.K. What’s the secret?

Secret one. You’ll get what you’ve always got if you keep doing what you’ve always done. (Anonymous)
And, secret two:
It’s what you learn after you know everything, that counts. (John Wooten)

So you are going to be offered the chance to move away from the level of results you are currently experiencing, no matter the quality of the results, and toward better faster.

Use Juran, Pareto, and Covey to observe you own activities. Their major writings can be summarized in a few sentences that are relevant to our focus today.
Work on your most productive, most highly leveraged activities and leave the other necessary but not so leveraged to others. Train others or buy their expertise to accomplish the supporting infrastructure for you business or career.

Gerber has produced the E-myth series that strongly advocates for delegation and investor thinking for business owners.

So where to we go from here?

Which activities do I drop and where do I concentrate?

Sorry. From this vantage point I can’t be specific about what activities. I can give you some guidance about that.

I recommend that you begin by being more self-observant, more aware and intolerant of interruptions. Further, notice in what part of your day you tend to be able to stay with a task with high levels of concentration and energy.

1. Begin your major shift by a conversation with yourself, your trusted partner or a business coach. The focus of the conversation is, “Where do I want to be in 3 years – in my profession or in my business?” Write it down. You will re-visit it from time to time as your perspective changes.

2. Answer, “My company exists to produce what?”

3. What is the “main thing?” What is the most important next action or accomplishment that has not been completed to move my career or my business toward where I want to be in 3 years?

4. After that what would follow?

5. Complete a list of the next 10 items along your 3 year path

6. Put them in order of priority

7. Plan how these will be done and who will accomplish them. P.S. mostly, not you.

8. Share your plan with every person who is in a position to assist. Ask for their support.

9. Decide who can contribute to achievement and deputize the,

10. Decide where and who can take care of the minutiae and the routine infrastructural activities, maybe your marketing, maybe your payroll. Engage them.

11. Be sure you have the right people in the right seats on the right bus to get you where you want to go.

12. Meet with everyone on your staff to share your vision and enlist their assistance, their minds and hearts. This is an issue of vital interest. It must start with your knowledge about where you are and where you are going. That leads to your work with those right people in the right seats.

13. Work with each of those right person/ right seat individuals to find how two important elements can be made to converge. The two elements are what the individual is willing to do, perhaps even eager to do, and what you need done. Sign ‘em up.

14. Keep track of your progress by establishing goals that can be measured and graphed.

15. Display a chart of your progress and update it frequently

16. Talk the talk. Keep your people focused on the next Main thing by relating progress on its achievement to your 3 year path.

17. Celebrate milestone achievements.

18. Stay in touch with your supporters. Acknowledge their individual contributions and the contributions of team work.

My favorite Longshoreman, Eric Hoffer, True Believer and 12 other books, (1902-1983)

“In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.”

So, determine where you are, where you are going, who will be alongside, helping to get there. Decide what you are going to do personally, and what you will ask others to do. Talk frequently to your supporters to acknowledge their help and keep them focused on the right direction. Display and celebrate success. Do these things well, and you will be able to take better care of your career, business, self, and others in your business and in your family.

With that accomplished, you will be doing so well, you can take Friday and all of Monday off.