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5 Proven Strategies to Turn Busy Into Productive and Supercharge Your Results For the New Financial Year

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While we often leave the champagne popping and hip, hip hoorays for the start of the calendar year, the beginning the New Financial Year signifies celebration and also new goal setting to ensure this FY21/22 makes a positive impact to your bottom line. Especially after the disruption and turmoil of last year.

In order to have the best opportunity to have a cracker FY21/22 year and make it one to remember fondly, there is one thing to be very aware of that can sneak up on you and sabotage your efforts. It’s a silent goal killer and it is busy!

Busy is of course what you want to be in business because if you’re not you have another problem on your hands. However, busy has become a huge problem in many organizations in that the busyness isn’t translating to runs on the board. In fact, busy is becoming the excuse used to shirk commitments, avoid conversations and justify poor performance and this is negatively impacting on the growth, culture and client service delivered in your organisation.

Busy is what we need to rein in and turn around pronto.

I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that busy doesn’t equate to success nor does busy mean productive. Success is driven by the quality of the actions you are executing and if they are aligned to your goals. Period!

The question I always ask is what are you busy doing?

Whilst we fundamentally know this, a reminder is always powerful. As Samuel Johnson once said “People need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed.”

With the playing field for leaders having changed and the biggest challenges for leaders being growth, a focused team and managing exhaustion, the need for you to get control of busy and make it work for you is high. I mean sky high. Because busy is the one thing that will hijack your success and keep the challenges you have firmly rooted within your business.

Here are 5 Busy Buster Tips to increase your productivity and supercharge your results.

  1. Get Clarity on Your Critical Tasks
    No doubt you have a gazillion things to do and many competing priorities. The simple fact of the matter is you can’t do everything all at once. I know you want to but you can’t. The trick is to understand your critical tasks – your priorities – that if you committed to these it would get you closer to your goals. You could break these down into your marathon and sprint tasks. I find it best to break these down into 90-day goals and then chunk down into monthly actions. The more specific you can get the better. Remember – these are your top priorities.
  2. Break Down Big Tasks into Smaller Achievable Tasks
    This is important to avoid overwhelm which raises its ugly head when tasks can seem too big to tackle and this negatively impacts on productivity. Break down larger tasks into bite sized chunks and understand what needs to happen first, second, third and fourth to comfortably chew away at the task.
  3. Stop Using the Word Busy
    Fact – busy is a mindset and not a healthy one. Let me be clear here, in business we all want to be busy – the good busy – which means we are making progress, being productive and achieving. However, you will be amazed the difference in what busy means to people. For 90% of those I have surveyed over the past 4 years, busy has a negative connotation and causes people to feel overwhelmed and out of control. You want to avoid that. In fact, busy really doesn’t have a meaning (look it up on Google – it means occupied – so what!) so stop using this language that can cause overwhelm and use language that is much more empowering and resourceful and notice the difference. You might use the word productive, making progress or simply explaining the awesome work you’re doing. Get creative. Simply using the word busy is getting rather boring!
  4. Carve Out Time to Think
    When you are running at a fast pace and trying to keep up with change and demands, the last thing you feel like you have time for is to stop and think. However, this is a MUST if you are going to work smarter and not harder. The thing to remember is time is just never going to show up, you will never ‘get’ time; you must make time to do what is going to make the biggest difference to your outcomes. This should be high on your priority list and protected as a not negotiable in order to elevate your thinking and map out exactly what is going on in your playing field. You can then make intelligent decisions around what lever to pull and where you may need to pull on the hand break. Elevating your thinking is intelligent leadership and you need to be doing this at least once a week, if not daily.
  5. Complete Your To-Do-List the Night Before
    There is power in this very simple task. By stopping and thinking for 15 minutes at the end of each day how to set your following day up for success improves focus and motivation. Rewriting your to do list at the end of each day and understanding what your top 3 priorities are alleviating the feelings of being out of control and busy and turns them into the feeling of being in control. This is motivating. It also allows you to understand where you may need to ask for help, what you need to delegate and how you need to communicate.

By committing to these 5 simple busy buster tips you will be able to gain control of busy and ensure your doing the things that are purposeful and intentional that will supercharge your results. It’s what you are doing that will make the difference – make sure you are doing the right things!

If this is something you are serious about for your organisation and you want to set your team up for success, contact me to have a chat about our FY21/22 Kick Off Offer and how this could work for you.