Optimise your effectiveness

M

any people at work and in business are not effective and not even efficient. They end up doing very little every day and week after week.

Most people do few small things leaving out the real big impactful actions. The reason? They have little idea about how to be effective at work, in business or in life in general. We know that there are two related terms, namely effectiveness and efficiency.

Effectiveness is about achieving the desired goal while efficiency is about producing more useful result per given inputs, in very simple terms. For purposes of this article, we will presume that both terms mean the same thing for simplicity.

In this regard, we are really addressing the need to optimise how you are productive and impactful every day.

Below are 10 things you can do to be very effective:

1. Have clear action plans: Every Sunday afternoon or evening, plan your key actions for the week ahead and write them down. Have a clear allocation of which actions will be done which day. Remember that some of the actions will take a number of days and so you may need to start them earlier. Every day, review the list and focus on the actions of that day.

2. Make priority list: Not all actions have the same importance or urgency. As you plan your actions, be clear on priority rankings. I have often met people who have completed many less useful actions at the expense of the more important ones.

3. Start with the harder actions: You need to apply the principle of delayed gratification. Start with the actions that are boring but very important and end with those that are easy or fun to do.

4. Work in parallel: A lot of people do very little because they always operate in the serial mode. They do one thing at a time. There are plenty of actions that you can put in action while you work on something else. It means that the people who are supposed to be attending to your issue are already dealing with that as you work on something else. This way, you gain a lot of time.

5. Avoid time wasters: This is a big one and a common source of lack of effectiveness. We keep being bombarded by time wasters. These could be things that are not that useful yet the consume a lot of our time or people who are not organised and have no real purpose but they keep showing up to us and wasting our time. You need to manage both sets of time wasters.

6. Hate queuing: In Malawi we love to wait and to queue up. Start hating queuing up and waiting. Organise yourself in ways that have minimal waiting time and time for queuing up.

Even at the bank, we often queue up, and yet there are days of the month or week and times of the day when there are barely queues there, go that time. Be very calculative to avoid queues.

7. Build your social capital: We are all connected beings. How big is your social network? The more social networks you have, the easier you get your things done. You rarely get stuck. You always know someone who can help when you need.

8. Ask for help: You may have a good social network but are you putting it to good use? When you need help, do not be shy to ask for it. Many people are happy to help. Do shout out.

9. Be ready to say no: I learnt this much later as I kept looking for further avenues of enhancing my effectiveness. At times we are less effective because we are afraid of disappointing others. Part of this game involves saying no to things that won’t help us to be effective.

10. Work hard and smart: Most big achievers have a good combination of working very hard and very smart. You can do one of the two and you will still achieve quite a lot but you can achieve much more if you work very hard and at the same time very smart.