Balancing Time Management and Success Philosophy

One of the many components of success philosophy says that good is never good enough.   There is always room for improvement.  Anything can be made faster, cheaper, better, smaller, and etc.  This is the driving motivation of successful people and organizations, “to build a better clock”.   Me – I tend to work fast.  Focusing on the big picture and trying to find where I can create the utmost value for my investment of time.   It’s like waiting tables.  The table spending all the money is where you want to focus your energy because it is going to be the big tipper or if you don’t have any tables spending money you want to focus on turning and burning the small tables until you get the big spending table.   You then find even if you didn’t get a big spending table you had enough of the little tables to make a buck or two equal to a big spending table.  Same thing in the executive level.  Depending on your environment one either figures out how to amp productivity through the roof or be successful with enough big ideas that one gets rewarded.

As a person that focuses on speed a lot of the time to get to the big things I make a habit to keep the philosophy that good is never good enough close to heart.  As my natural tendancy can be to speed over the big idea or the important thing never recognizing its big or important nature.  So, this has become a focus for me in my work life.  Trying to slow down and catch all the important things and squeeze value out of them.

I’ve recently moved on to a Chief Financial Officer position and for the last six months have been adapting to new rolls and responsibilities.  And have made a few minor mistakes here or there trying to step up to a new challenging level of work.  It is my hope that my latest and largest mistake is the end of the beginning of my adaptation phase.

My latest learning experience has been in the realm of time management and it’s clash with the success philosophy that good is never good enough.  I had considered myself to be an absolute expert in (NOTE: Pride Always Comes Before a Fall) time management.    Planning out my years, months, weeks and days in detail allowing of course for flexibility and other things.  If you plan out your time you can get a lot done and you also know what to focus on most to get that “a lot” done.  Focus is power.  And prioritized power creates value because value is squeezed out of core activities.

However, I had never before recognized the competing demands of not good enough to get things done and placing to much time and focus on the big things.  Often times their are many core things which one can and MUST due which create value.  And time is a limited resource.    I found out when two things of value collided with limited time.  One was neglected and the other was over focused on.  Writing strategic planning documents for grant funding caused the more mundane and regular things to be put off which created other more complex issues.  I didn’t have to put some much time into the big thing to still pull enough success and value out of it.  I was pushing towards perfection.  I should have let it slide at 70 to 80% which was good enough for all conceivable purchases.  The extra time moving the big idea from perhaps 80 to 90% was to much time.  It should have been good enough at 80% because sometimes time is limited and things have to be good enough.

When time becomes constrained and there are high value things and low value things the ROI has to be thought about and analyzed.  What value is necessary to have does it have to be perfect or 90%, would 70% be sufficient when other things are pressing too.  I didn’t priortize and scheduled mass amounts of time working on the big thing and put off the smaller things.  Can’t do that and won’t do that again.