Priorities – Wasting Time

When I started this set of blogs for this week, I am finishing up Darren Hardy’s book called The Compound Effect.  Making simple changes in our life that compounds and takes our lives, over time, for either the good or the bad.

Before I started the book, I made a simple change in life that I believe will have a drastic improvement with my family.  As I told my youngest who is working with me on it, she got me out of my imposed “retirement” from it.  It was not a priority when I did it the first 2 times due to family obligations, but I am hoping to finish it this time with her help.  Plus, it gives me something to bond with her on.

Our actions show what priorities are in our life.  We state what our priorities are, we believe what we state, but our actions must go along with those priorities.  If our actions do not follow, we waste our time, and we only have 86,400 seconds to a day.

There is nothing wrong with people having different priorities.  Co-workers will often have a different set of priorities than you on projects.  While one works on the data storage, another will work on the interface with the data.  Combining those priorities makes the project successful.

Other times, a co-worker will state their priority but will not take action.  At this point, they are wasting the team’s time.  Delivery of the finished product or goal cannot be delivered when priorities differ vastly.

So take time to utilize your 86,400 seconds wisely.  Set your priorities.  Manage your time.  Let your actions follow your priorities.

Priorities – What is important?

We have our 86,400 seconds for the day.  We have prioritized what to work on, and we start our day.

Now we all know the day may start one way, but it is always sidetracked somewhere by other people’s priorities.  I have an ongoing debate with myself if instant messaging, or affectionately known by the term IM, is a tool of good or evil, because it is too easy for people to contact you and sidetrack you to their priority.  Most of the time, I do not mind the quick IM’s and able to take a couple of minutes to get a priority done for someone.  Love helping people.  Every once in a while, I have to explain to the user to send me an e-mail, because I cannot work on it right at this moment and do not want to lose their request by closing the IM window and forgetting about it.

E-mail is my preferred method on keeping communication going and prioritizing items.  Have it in writing, so you know what you deliver is exactly what is written.  We have so many projects and high workloads that we get things jumbled before we can make the items in the e-mail a priority.

I was on a meeting a number of years ago with a manager and another co-worker from our group.  We agreed on what needed to be done.  We agreed on the priority.  We took steps to deliver.  We even described it in an e-mail.  The manager then went to his boss who sent it up the chain of command and said the agreed upon solution was not what was discussed, and we were off target.  In this case, he felt it was more important to state the solution was not what he agreed too, but he was truly covering his tail due to a problem occurring in the first place and deflecting all the blame upon others.

From my standpoint, what is important is the end product and not deflecting blame or pointing fingers.  We have a priority to deliver the best work we can.  We determine what is important and focus upon that priority.

Priorities – Starting our day

Before I even start my Monday’s, I start late Sunday night.  I want the first working day of the week to start the same as the other working days of the week.  I clean up e-mails, do any support issues that cropped up over the weekend, evaluate weekly reports, and so on.  I try not to have any big surprises when I start on Monday.

When I get up and while coffee is brewing, I will listen to daily podcasts delivered in my personal e-mail from John C Maxwell and Darren Hardy.  I then read from the Bible based upon a site for “Reading the Bible in a Year (link to this is found on my prayer page http://www.rdconcepts.biz/Prayer.aspx).

Now I have my coffee, had some breakfast, and my daily reading done, I start reviewing what to work on for the day and what meetings I must attend.

For me, the routine is what gets me in the proper mindset to set my priorities for the day.  We only have 86,400 seconds.  We need to make the most of it.

Priorities

We are all busy.  We are all pulled in different directions.  We have so much going on that we do not know what to work on next.

I am married and have three daughters active in various activities.  I work for a company as well as my personal endeavors (farm land, EMT, programming, personal development act ivies, etc…..).  I am stretched thin.

Time management has become a vastly important thing to me.  We all do time management by setting our priorities.  There is only a given amount of time in a day.

My wife writes a blog at http://lisadblog.wordpress.com/.  One of her first blogs, she needed a way to show the difference in time and had me write an online program to show this (http://www.rdconcepts.biz/DateDifference.aspx).  As the difference between yesterday and today shows, we all have the same amount of time which is 86,400 seconds.

How we manage our time and decide what to work on is based upon us.

Proposals – Clear Objectives

My favorite thing in the world is to build systems that help people.  Giving back.  I try to keep my mind, body, and spirit in as much balance as I can lately due to recommendations of so many successful people giving that advice and giving back falls into the spirit portion for me.

When we sit down to write that proposal to give it to our clients, we got to get the right questions answered to gain the clear objective of what the client truly needs.  Sometimes, we have to cut through the jungle of what they think they need with a machete to find out what they truly need and communicate in a way they see the true need themselves.

My last few classes in grad school dealt with project management, and I was so thankful.  It was a skill that I had not honed yet.  Over the last 8 years since grad school, I have read many business books to improve my communication skills.

As entrepreneurs working for clients in the computer industry, we have to utilize our vast skills to gain a clear objective, writing a proposal for the client to state clearly on what they need, and then using our management & development skills to deliver to the client exactly what they need.  No matter how successful we get, we are actually here to help others like fulfilling our clients’ needs.

Proposals – Time is Valuable

I am getting bigger on taking the recommendation of so many business writers when they talk about value based fees in a proposal instead of an hourly breakdown.  We all know the projects where the meeting to discuss it, writing the proposal in great detail, and getting it approved after major tweaking actually takes longer than the project.

In my opinion, smaller projects do not need an extreme detailed write-up including a breakdown of hours in multiple categories.  If you can breakdown their needs and what you will be delivering within a few pages with a set dollar amount, the clients will be farther ahead.

I had a meeting to discuss a proposal with roughly six people from the client side.  It lasted an hour.  It took a few of hours to go through the proposal including questioning of hours being too much in one area in their opinion.  The actual work came down to 8 hours to develop and 4 hours of execution time to get the deliverables created.  So for a total of 16 hours of everything, a good chunk was arguing over the hours being written in the proposal.  Instead, it could have been less than three pages with a dollar amount of what it will cost.  Work completed the same week as the initial meeting.

At times, we need the hourly breakdown especially internal with managing so many clients and a lot of work.  Even then, I am seeing a benefit of just giving a dollar amount with a project completion instead of hours to the client.

I look at it when I buy a car.  I could really care less about a bunch of numbers the dealership is throwing at me.  BOTTOM LINE.  How much is it going to cost me?  Plain and simple.

Proposals – Overloaded with Input

How many people have been through the following scenario?  You are trying to land a large contract, trying to get the proposal written, and everyone and their dog is on a meeting with you to discuss it.  With so many people on the call, you know many of those do not have authority to approve the project but are only there to punch holes in the ideas being generated.

So you arrive at “You want A, B, and C with the outcome being D.” only to get the out of left field questions.   Having been in this business for well over 20 years for varying size firms and clients, I should not be surprised with the questions that come up, but I still do.  This one time the questions pertained to hardware failures so drastic that I wanted to point out that it is not this project in jeopardy from what they are describing but the entire organization.  This is why we have disaster recovery plans.  Just in case that meteorite falls out of the sky right on top of the datacenter, they can recover.

You also have the proposal being approved only to be brought up weekly in meetings trying to still go over it like it has not been written.   You just want to yell “People, it has been approved.  Work is almost completed.  You do not want to change it now and force the whole process to start over which entails a huge bill and delay in implementation.”

In the book I read, Alan Weiss brought up valid points about getting with the economic buyer and trying to limit the large involvement of so many people.

Proposals – The Personal Touch

I have just finished a book by Alan Weiss on writing proposals.  It has made me stop to think about my own processes and how proposals were done in various places I have been too.  At times during the reading, I just shook my head over the mistakes I had experienced with proposals.

When we were first starting down this entrepreneurial computer tract, we got onto an e-mail list requesting proposals from the state government.  It sounded logical at the time.  What a waste of time (and I would have known it if I would have read the book sooner).  Large firms, and not our small start-up, are geared toward utilizing these type of requests.

A company I have since become familiar with knows how to get the contracts.  It was fascinating to have dinner with the owner, and he talked about the failures he has had in his business life.  From those failures, he built a company and maintains a personal relationship with the right people, and he is also able to grab independent minded computer professionals to fill those contracts the people come to him for.

My most successful project has been with a gentleman who just wanted to build a better system than he was forced to use at his work.  He came to me via a recommendation.  So in this modern day world of texting, e-mailing, and social media, the personal relationships still matter when getting your foot in the door and getting your proposal approved.