"Self-Management: Five Steps To A More Effective You"
Welcome back to TRIM.
"Self-Management: Five Steps To A More Effective You”
With practise all five of these activities will become second nature to you. You will eventually find yourself doing them almost without thinking about them. TRIM is all about helping you to make the most of your journey through life.
TRIM will help you to be better organised, completely reliable, more valued by other people, and generally happy with the way you live. But you can only make a journey if you have somewhere to go. There is no point in travelling at top speed if you’re going in the wrong direction – and no satisfaction in being efficient and effective at doing something if you don’t know why you’re doing it in the first place. You need to decide where you want to go in life, when you would like to arrive and how you will measure your progress.
If you work in an office or factory, you will already be familiar – probably all too familiar – with the idea of ‘goal-setting’. Organisations set goals, or targets, to measure how much work they are getting done. Often, individual workers or teams are given incentives to encourage them to hit these targets – or even penalties if they don’t. Goals like this are useful for the organisations concerned, but their employees often see them as simply an extra pressure to work harder. The goals that you are going to set for yourself are completely different, for one very important reason:
They are about you and you alone.
Your hopes, your ambitions, your dreams.
Priorities are different from objectives – sometimes very different – but you can’t have one without the other. Very often you will have to think about your priorities to decide what you are going to do, who you are going to see, or whether you will make a commitment to someone. People have very personal ways of establishing their priorities, depending on their own work style and approach to life. You must make sure that however you decide on them, your priorities work for you. You must aim to deliver on your commitments, every time. You must control what you commit yourself to.
TRIM’s two main tools ensure that you always know exactly what’s coming up, and what you should be doing about it. The first and most important is the Terrain Map. The Terrain Map provides a dynamic picture of all of your commitments, contacts, travel and tasks for the day, which is constantly updated as you deal with new information and progress through the day’s activities. It provides the central focus for everything that happens during the day and ensures that you always know exactly where you should be, what you should be doing or who you should be talking to, and what information you need to have at hand to make your activities as effective as possible.
The other vital tool is the Weekly Helicopter Trip – a regular review of the past week’s events and an initial planner for the next two weeks. This helicopter view sets everything in context and ensures no major clashes: it gives you a real feeling of empowerment when you know exactly where you plan to be and what you will be able to achieve. Of course innumerable things will happen in that time – some of them predictable (so plan) and some right out of the blue. But having an overall picture of the way things should look is a great basis to work from.
You need the most effective ways of storing information so that it always relates to the right people or actions, and can easily be retrieved when you need it. TRIM’s information systems are all about capturing the opportunities – setting up ways of sorting the mass of information you’re constantly bombarded with, recognising the valuable bits and making sure they are stored in relevant places.
Do you always do what you say you will? Or are you unreliable – late for appointments (if you turn up at all) and always missing the deadline for urgent reports? TRIM provides foolproof ways of making sure that you always carry out your undertakings – on time – or, if it is really impossible for you to do so, of reaching new agreements that leave all parties feeling satisfied. And never forgetting an appointment again...
Does ‘negotiate’ sound a bit formal? After all, you don’t sit round a conference table to decide which pub to go to after the tennis match. But in fact, you’re almost certainly negotiating every time you make arrangements with someone: you both probably have slightly different preferences (“It’s closer to my house...” or “ I can take the bus and leave the car at home...”) and you will almost certainly end up making a commitment (“See you at three...”). Of course in a work context you may be making much more important decisions – and commitments. It pays to understand your relationships and make sure that you always have the information you need at your fingertips. That way you can manage your interactions, achieve the outcomes that suit you. and have others deliver for you.
As always, there may be many considerations in your negotiations, and things may not be as simple as they first appear. You might decide that it’s not worth arguing with your teenage son about making dinner tonight, because you know that next week you’ll be asking him to walk the dog while you’re away. So a tactical retreat is called for... you decide to give up a current short-term objective in favour of one later on.
That is it for now.
Next week I want to look at “Interactions - That Is What It Is All About”.
Until next week’s article.
In the meantime, more details on using TRIM to increase your effectiveness can be found in the TRIM book which is available to purchase at www.abmtrim.com You can even download the first two chapters completly free of charge.
Best Regards,
Stuart
TRIM
The Practical Links Between Motivation And Achievement
