How to Overcome the Elusive (and Volatile) Time Factor in Business

When I started teaching a course to veterans on starting or accelerating their business, I wanted to follow a pattern that was laid down for me in law school.  Understand the fundamentals…getting to know the technicalities will (and only needs to) develop over time.  For business, one of those fundamentals is the planning cycle. Many people get wrapped up in either doing too much planning and analysis and never executing (or executing too late) or they do not do any planning and go about shooting constantly from the hip.

Well, my Italian grandmother would always say “everything in moderation.”  Similar to that, I’m sure you’ve heard the idea, “Don’t let perfection be the enemy of good” (also an Italian saying by the way… Voltaire was a poacher).  That’s not an endorsement for mediocrity.  It is an emphasis on not going to extremes.

The great “leveler” in decision-making and on the action/analysis spectrum is time.  Time, as everyone knows, is an extremely limited resource.  Time is what forces us to prioritize.  It demands we make trade-offs, or more simply, choices.   So many articles have been written about time management that I’m not even going to go there.  If time management theories were great, the first one ever written would be the last one ever written, because it would be successful.

Time management, multi-tasking (only effective with mindless or non-thought invoking tasks), and truly “effective” prioritization techniques are all fallacies.   They don’t ever happen.   Most people in their own business (or even those that work for someone else) will tell you that only about 20% of “planned” activities for a future point are actionable, simply because something else jumps in ahead of it, Murphy shows up, and those in the military know, the enemy gets a vote, and hence, no plan survives first contact with the enemy.

There is always some level of planning that must be done, if for no other reason, to force you to sit down and consider contingencies and alternatives.  If this happens, I’ll do this, and if the response is this, I’ll do that… and so on.   There must always be a “jumping off” point, however.   If all everyone did was plan and analyze, nothing would get done.

Fortunately, failure is a better teacher than success.  It is perfectly fine to do something and get it wrong as long as two things are in place beforehand.  One, you accept that you made that choice and have a backup plan.  Two, you adopt a growth mindset before you start.  That is, one that allows you to view falling short/failure NOT as a stick with which to beat yourself up (that’s a complete waste of the all-powerful time), but rather, you see it as the learning experience it is.   Adopting that mindset will become powerful.  It will help you manage your time.  It will help you adapt quickly.  It will help you achieve the best possibility of success.

What you quickly learn is that prioritization is a tool, not an objective. Analysis is a tool, not an objective. Planning is a tool, not an objective.  Successful completion (or deletion!) of a task is the objective.  That will only happen when you take control of your mindset and create your own process for the inevitable “if this happens, I do X… if that happens, I do Y… the result of doing those needs attention and further action, I do Z.”