Short coaching-style transcript advising how to protect strategic work from day-to-day firefighting: identify when you get sidetracked (often Monday mornings), reserve and block time (e.g., Monday morning and start of each day) for proactive outreach to top accounts, and set up routines, processes, and honest accountability so strategic tasks get done before emergencies consume the day.
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, right? 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 your 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, et cetera, 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. I hope this one helpful.
We'll talk to you again soon.
Bye bye.
