doug smith training

What happens if you start working before you have set any priorities for the day? It might cause you to miss a high priority item. What happens if you always prioritize work over your own needs? Well, you decide that, but often it leads to dissatisfaction, trouble in the home life, and burn out. Your work matters, of course. Your own well being matters even more. Your work matters most when you matter first. Better you = better results. What do you think? -- doug smith  

What if your biggest goal is not your most important goal? It's natural to think that your priorities are always determined by size: which goal will produce the largest revenue, save the most money, or give you the biggest impact. And, yes that's important. But should it determine what goal you work on today? I guess that it depends on whether you ask yourself or your boss, but I like to ask myself "which goal brings you the most joy right now?" Happiness matters. What if the purpose of achieving your goals is to make you happy? What if while you are working om your goals you felt great joy?  If the joy is missing, maybe the goal isn't so big after all... -- doug smith

  How far afield have you ever gotten distracted?  Have you ever gotten so far distracted that you forgot who you are? Not literally who you are, but rather who you are supposed to be in your work. Your role, your vision, your mission -- your PURPOSE for working. Presumably who you ARE is safely lit in your heart. It's in our work that we can get confused. At least, that's true for me. I've at times taken assorted bunny trails down jobs that were not suited for my purpose. I did them, whether it was as a favor, or out of a desire to serve, or to simply earn some money -- but I could always feel, in those times, a gentle tug telling me "hey, this isn't you..."  Like a small cat patting me on the head when I shouldn't be sleeping. Like a small puppy tugging on my pants leg when I should be outside, moving around...that gentle but irritating feeling that there is better work ahead, but what I'm doing is getting in the way. It's easy to do. Life will l

Have you ever kept a goal alive for far too long after it's become obvious that you don't really care about it? You've got so MANY great goals, it's OK to drop a dud. Dropping a goal you'll never achieve is better than pretending that you still believe. -- doug smith

Yes can be a trap. We want to please, so we say yes. We want to be great team players, so we say yes. We want to be exemplary family members, so we say yes. Have you ever worn yourself out with your own yes yes yes? Yes. Me, too. Sometimes we've got to say no. No to the goal that someone else wants us to complete but that interferes with our own goals. No to the task that should be done by someone else. No to the questionable ethical (or clearly unethical) demand. No. Unless we have the courage to say no, our yes always belongs to someone else. Let's own our own yes by owning our own no. -- doug smith

How many top priorities do you have? The trouble with too many top priorities is getting them done. Too many top priorities means you don't really have priorities -- just a really long list of goals. Have all the goals you want. Goals are great. I've know people who carry a list of 100 goals. They check them off one by one, and some have truly accomplished nearly half. That takes time, and feels more like a bucket list than a goals list. Top goals are what you work on first. Top goals are what you prioritize above all else. Top goals are where your results make a meaningful distance. High performance leaders show the courage to focus on five top goals. How many do you focus on? -- doug smith

Are you carrying any useless goals? Maybe they didn't start out useless, but still you carry them long after the energy has drained. If you've got goals that you no longer care about, that have no real customer, and don't align with your mission, you might want to let them go. Focus on the right goals. The ones that make you both smile and sweat. The goals that once you have achieved them take you to a different place, put you in a better mood, or build something contributing to your success. Let go of the wrong goals to make room for the right ones. The right goals help make the right decisions. -- doug smith

Tackle that feeling of overwhelm using a practice, simple tool. Situation: Overloaded with tasks. Getting delegated to from multiple sources and you suspect someone may be overloading you. Bonus: Helps you prioritize based on who assigned the work Allows you to add and identify what you own because you assigned it (to yourself OR to others) How it works: Add a column for "Per" for the person who assigned you the task. For example: Priority Scale: A = Urgent, important, and due today B = Important but not urgent C = Not due soon, more tactical than strategic D = Delegate or delete these Additional Uses: A way to show the people who assign you work how much they assign you and also what else you are working on. Makes you assign a realistic priority value instead of calling everything an A (urgent AND important.) When deployed among your team you can see if the distribution of work is optimal or needs adjusting. -- doug smith

High performance leaders take care of the details. What helps the most in taking care of the right details is keeping focus. Knowing what is important is the first step, acting on what is most important is the next step. No one can do everything, so high performance leaders maintain a sharp focus. To determine that focus, identify your goals. Align those goals with your mission, and the focus develops naturally. Prioritizing becomes easier when you know what is most important. What is your focus? Our goals reveal our focus, so be sure to focus those goals! -- doug smith Leadership Call to Action: Play hard, work hard, be smart!

I'm still looking for someone who can do everything. Every task on their list, every task on their boss's list, every goal in their endless stream of goals. I still haven't found them. I'm still looking for the person who can finish everything they've started, who can achieve any goal while tackling all goals, and who never gets nervous in the process. I still haven't found them. No one can do everything. Not even you. Chaos comes when we try to do everything. Chaos comes when everything looks like it's as important as everything else. Chaos comes, and it screams. Do you hear the screaming? Do you enjoy the screaming? Chaos screams! Prioritize. Prioritize and chaos will settle down. -- doug smith

It feels harder than ever these days to prioritize. We get pulled into so many directions it's hard to know what to do first. Every day feels like life on the edge of (or in the middle of) chaos. What to do? Common sense says priories. Decide what is most important and focus first on that. Build the future you want by working on it today. The place to start? The place to start prioritizing is with your goals. Limit how many you have. Rank the ones you have set by priority, and then focus your efforts accordingly. We all have to start somewhere. It might as well be with our goals. -- doug smith

What happens if you decide to do every goal you could possibly do? You don't do them. Maybe you do some of them. Maybe you get thru a bunch. But I've learned to face it: I can not do everything. When I try, something falls. Some goals are better than others. Do them first. Some goals make more sense and provide more traction, more action, more reaction, and better results. Do them first. Pick too many goals and your constraints will crash in on you. Pick the right goals and your possibilities are endless. Pick the right goals. -- Doug Smith

Do you have a hard time saying no? The trouble with always saying yes is that it's impossible to do everything. I don't know a single person who can do everything. Can you? It's better to say no than to explain why you didn't finish what you promised. And when we say yes, it sounds like a promise. Prioritize. Consider the work involved. Understand where you can make your biggest impact. Focus on the goals that get you to your mission and de-prioritize anything that does not. You will meet with resistance. You will get some push-back. But before you make that promise -- think about the option of saying no. Often, it's not as big a deal as we feared because someone else can step in and do it. But once we take it on, it's ours. Say no, rather than disappoint. It's what they would want. -- Doug Smith

Have you ever forgotten a goal? What causes that? Some people will say that we can forget a goal if we're too busy. Or, maybe we have too many goals. Or maybe, just maybe, we forget the goal because it just isn't that important to us. Any goal that I forget is not really a goal, is it? If that goal is worthwhile, work on it. If it isn't - make room for something that is! -- Doug Smith

Do the people you work with know and understand your priorities? It's easy to take for granted that our priorities are clear, but most of the time they are not. We need to let people know. We need to act according to our priorities. As important as our goals are, other people have goals of their own and sometimes they can hijack our efforts in service to theirs. People will shift your priorities unless you constantly remind them what they are. Talk about it. Tell people your priorities. What's your number one goal? Where do you expect your team to be a year from now? To achieve your goals, be sure to act relentlessly on your plan, no matter how many attempts to shuffle your priorities emerge. Day to day living is nice, but it's in communicating our priorities that we achieve them. -- Doug Smith

What is your number one goal? Which goal, if given the opportunity, you'd want the most people to know about? We've all got tons of goals. Sometimes we have too many goals to keep track of them all. When I find myself getting lost in the details and spinning my creative wheels it's likely due to having too many goals. It's good to have lots of goals, but we still need to prioritize. We need to have a number one goal. As one of my great mentors Anne Delaney once said to me, "You have one number one goal. When you achieve that number two gets a promotion." That has always stayed with me. How to prioritize your goals - which one would you most like to talk about on The Tonight Show? That's your number one goal. What's your number one goal? What are you doing to achieve it right now? -- Doug Smith