28 Jan 2026 · 2 min
Bill Gallagher on why you keep abandoning your big goals for urgent stuff, and how to stop it: diagnose when you get sidetracked (usually by Monday noon), then block time early in the week or day to protect your priorities before firefighting takes over.
Another thing that we hear a lot of is that you have all these great strategic goals. You've drank the Kool Aid, you've got a strategic plan, you have quarterly plans against annual initiatives and then things happen. You get sidetracked by day to day firefighting emergencies. Right. So how do we deal with that? Well, it's great to start out with a strategic plan, it's great to divvy that up among people and that kind of thing. All that's really good. Then you have to deal with yourself in the day to day. And the real thing that's useful to do is to be honest with yourself and the people around you to allow them to also be honest. Where do you get displaced and where are you not doing the strategic things first? So we had somebody in a time of growth in one of the teams that had created and had focused on a number of top level accounts to do some strategic work with and was always getting displaced by all of the other things, the email, voicemail, etc. The correspondence that came in, they come in Monday morning, morning. By Monday noon, the whole week was shot and they were firefighting. So here's the key. With that team, we did two things. We had them think about their day and where it went off. It went off Monday morning and we reserved time first to block in on Monday morning and then actually the beginning of every day to do proactive outreach to that strategic account list that was on their priorities. This is the way you do it. You figure out the time where you go off and then you design in something before or to keep you from going off in that place. But that requires you be honest with yourself and the people around you about where you go off. And you set up systems, process routines, schedules so that you address the things that are important when they actually need to be addressed. And that is really the key. We all have great intentions and then we go off somewhere. So we want to first get straight about where we go off so that we can put in and design a different plan to address it. Then we address the strategic things with just enough time. Time and before we get on to the firefighting that is always there and going to be there. But you want to put just a little bit in on those strategic things that'll make all the difference in the world. Hope that's been helpful. We'll talk to you again soon.
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