5 Tips to Controlling Your Day
You are a General Manager of a medium size business. You arrive at work by 9:00 a.m., say “hello” to your team, check your email and start your day. Before you know it, it is 5:00 and your day is finished. You leave your office and drive home. As you sit down to dinner with your spouse, they ask “how was your day”? Busy, you reply. You are always so busy, is the response. What did you do? Well, I checked email, helped with this, helped with that, answered some more emails, visited with a customer and… Then it hits you. You spent the entire day busy and really did not accomplish anything. You bounced from task to task and didn’t actually get one thing done that moved your business forward.
You are not alone. This is a common issue and the perception of being busy is what is keeping you from improving the most important thing…the business you are operating. In the book “The E-Myth”, the author refers to it as being so busy working in your business that you never actually work on your business. Do you fall into this category? Do you find days, weeks, and months passing by with you being busy, and your business under-performing? I have too! I remember calling one of my personal mentors after hearing him talk about all the actions he was taking. I asked him how he made that happen. I am always so busy!
The bottom line, is that any management role is busy. We have so many things coming at us from so many different directions, it is so easy to get pulled from fire to fire and never really get the chance to put our effort into the number 1 priority. So how can we fix this? How can we avoid getting caught up in the storms of the day and drive our ship toward its destination?
Self-Awareness
First, we need to be self-aware. We need to realize that we are wasting time. The “compound effect” as we know will work against you just as much as it will work for you. If you are wasting time focusing your attention on items that do not move your business forward, it will eventually show in your P&L.
Establish Priorities
We must establish our priorities. Your priority for the year, month, week, and day. The daily priorities should lead to the weekly and the weekly into the month, while the month will lead to the success for the year.
Action Items
Each day, list the “Action Item” that you are committed to for that day. This should lead to your weekly priority. Do not let anything distract you from that “Action Item”. It may be developing a Team Member, closing 3 deals, meeting 20 Customers, etc. The key is to be dedicated to this “Action Item” and do not even consider leaving work until it is completed.
Teamwork
Train your team to handle Customer Care issues. You can get caught up in these issues and lose an entire week at a time. Every customer with a problem wants to talk to a manager. The truth is that most front-line Team Members can handle 99% of the customers problems. The Team should be trained thoroughly in handling these issues and if they cannot, there should be a process in place for them to send you an email after assuring the customer that the manager will be reaching out within 24 hours. Notice I said email… NOT sticky notes, post-it notes, or notes written on scratch paper. We will discuss checking email in another article, as this creates a rabbit hole that runs deep and causes a tremendous amount of time lost due to “switch cost”.
Check In
Now that you are self-aware, you have established your priorities, set “Action Items”, trained your Team to handle Customer Care issues, you now need to set time aside to check in. Start your day with a quick review. What is my priority? What am I not going to do today? Set a mid-day alarm and a late afternoon alarm to check in and make sure you are staying on track.
A day in the life of a General Manager can be extremely hectic. We cannot change that, however we can change the way we prepare and by implementing these 5 steps, I am confident that you will see an improvement in your business, as well as more control in your days, which will certainly help alleviate some of the stress that comes along with the title.