This post is part of the One Goal Project to achieve exceptional performance at work. Learn more.
When it comes to getting things done, how reliable are you? (source: hryck)
Our next One Goal is to achieve exceptional performance in execution and follow through. This month, our focus will be on the 4 key aspects to doing this:
- Achieving results within allotted time frames
- Being as efficient as possible with your time
- Taking good ideas and implement them
- Displaying a bias for action and closure in everything that you do
At Quicken Loans, we have an ISM (or saying): “Innovation is rewarded. Execution is worshipped.” It’s clear: the ability to get things done is at the very core of exceptional performance.
I will be sharing tips from popular thinkers, tips already on this blog and in the blogosphere, and another interview on this topic. We’ll also go out to LinkedIn and see what ideas people have to share.
To get started, reflect this weekend on the following passage from Peter Drucker’s “Managing Oneself,” published in the Harvard Business Review in January, 2005:
Throughout history, the great majority of people never had to ask the question, “What should I contribute?” They were told what to contribute, and their tasks were dictated either by the work itself – as it was for the peasant or artisan – or by a master or a mistress – as it was for domestic servants.
There is no return to the old answer of doing what you are told or assigned to do. [You] have to learn to ask a question that has not been asked before: “What should my contribution be?” To answer it, [you] must address three distinct elements:
- What does the situation require?
- Given my strengths, my way of performing and my values, how can I make the greatest contribution to what needs to be done?
- What results have to be achieved to make a difference?
After you have done that, please take 5 minutes to read this influential piece about time management from Tim Ferriss: On the Shortness of Life: An Introduction to Seneca.
See also: