"The essence of genius is to know what to overlook." -- William James (1842-1910) Doctor, Psychologist, Philosopher
A client of mine uses a powerful tool to help his executive team decide what not to do with their time. He has each member keep a pie chart of where his/her energy is focused. When new projects come along, they discuss how sections and percentages should shift. "You've got to know where your energy should and shouldn't go each day," he explains. "Sometimes it's obvious and sometimes it's not. We've found explicitly talking about it every few months helps. Team members tend to feel more empowered in what they're doing and are more successful as a result."
Consider This:
In any endeavor, you get bombarded with more information than you can handle. If you try to focus on too much you'll scatter your energy - and lose your effectiveness. To succeed, sort out major issues from minor ones. Selectively disengage from some activities so that you can powerfully engage in others.
Try this:
1. Create a pie chart of how you currently spend your time & energy.
2. Take note of areas where you might be spending too much energy on minor issues.
3. Create a second pie chart to reflect changes you might make to improve efficiency/effectiveness/enjoyment.
4. Like the example above, try sharing the chart with others to get useful feedback on where you should or shouldn't focus your energy.
Question: How do you decide what to overlook?
Related Stories: | Topics:Leadership, William James |
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Recent Comments | 10 Total
September 30, 2005 at 3:13am by Dharmendra Misra
Everyday we spend around 80% of our energy in unproductive work. Out of this, around 60% goes in creating problem or unproductive moments for others. Therefore we all are in mesh like network and we all are sucking energy from each other as well as we'll are making ourselves available freely for extracting our creativity in undesired consumption of energy.
Approach towards so called modernization has increased such activities.
How to avoid this is a big game and those who know how to play this game creates diverse opportunities around themself. A leader must have capapbilities to create opportunities
September 30, 2005 at 7:57am by Jason Bates
I like the Pi chart of time/energy. We do all indeed have only so much time and effort to "spend" on our day to day tasks, and as Covey et. al. are so fond of saying, the urgent often distracts from the important.
The only question I'd raise is to whether people actually have an intuitive grasp of how they spend their time. As with finances, it's easy to have an idea as to where your money is going month to month, but until you track it.. do you really know?
I wonder if there is a danger of producing a pi chart that does not represent reality...? and you know what happened to the house built on a foundation of sand ;o)
Jason Bates
canOworms
September 30, 2005 at 3:10pm by roger fulton
Hey, there is nothing an old dog loves better than a new trick - I'm in.
Roger Fulton
Yuma, Arizona
http://spaces.msn.com/members/rogerroost/
September 30, 2005 at 4:51pm by Paul Phulps
See Lifebalance software from Llamagraphics at
http://www.llamagraphics.com/LB/LifeBalanceTop.html
It does pretty much what this article describes
September 30, 2005 at 11:26pm by eric payer
The secret to the realistic pie chart is a realistic time study. It is somewhat painful and cumbersome to keep track of your life in 15 or 30 minute segments for a month, but until you have a base line of reality it is difficult to recognize the areas of potential improvement.
October 1, 2005 at 1:47pm by Sharon Richmond
Indeed, it's can be a tedious process, but it's one I've used successfully with several leadership clients. It's not only eye-opening for the leaders, but at least one client I've worked with decided to use this simple tool with some of their direct reports, as a way to help them all clarify priorities and gain agreement about what they each needed to be focused on. And of course, I've learned a lot from it, too.
October 1, 2005 at 3:08pm by mark keller
Thanks for the great suggestion. I have been reading Focal Point by Brian Tracey. We waste a lot of time. Analyizing how are time is spent is so important. Thanks for the great post.
October 2, 2005 at 2:21am by rakesh bhatia
with so much of clutter around us we end up wasting most of our time.hence we have to guard our time well by discplining our activities.most of the results @ workplace come from 20% of time efforts.imagine if we were to focus 100% of our time effort in productive activities the entire gdp of countries could increase 5 fold,specially for developing countries like ours india and the whole world would be a better place thru this multiplier effect.
October 3, 2005 at 7:18am by Vincent
Next, the pie chart will show that too much time is spent filling out the pie chart, rather than doing actual work... Only half-joking, while it is good to think about work, sometimes it's good to just do the work. Perhaps, point 1 should be changed to "schedule a time to...", and to repeat that once a week, month or quarter.
October 3, 2005 at 1:35pm by Mark Allen Grainger with All About Teamwork.com
Great Post!
What I like most about your post Doug is the concept of energy. My mantra is Biggest Energy = Biggest Success. But that energy must be focused on the right things. This brings us to the concept of Collective Intelligence which my research suggests is initiated by a group's focus of their energy. How much would an organization improve if they followed a Collective Intelligence Model that forcused all of their energy on the two or three organizational priorities? Your client's pie chart discussions is moving the team beyond team building and into the advanced applications of Collective Intelligence... I'd be willing to bet that your client would be fascinated with the concept's potential.
A lot of really great stuff to chew on with your post.... thanks.