Are You Doing The Work?

We’re all busy.  Look at anyone’s calendar, they are filled with meetings.  We fill our time with activities—email, tweeting, research, CRM, more meetings–some with customers, more email, forecast and pipeline reviews, deal reviews, presentations, conference calls……  The list goes on.

Our time is so valuable, we sit in meetings, not paying attention because we have to email, text, or tweet.  Thank goodness for multitasking!

We complain about it, we look harried, we feel time pressured, yet we revel in the busyness.  In too many organizations, one’s worth seems to be measured by the number of meetings attended.

We’re busy, but are we really doing the work?

Sure, email, tweeting, CRM, meetings, and reviews are some of the activities we have to undertake, but doing the work is different.

Doing the work is purposeful and focused.  Doing the work has goals and direction–it’s not aimless, it’s minimally interrupt driven.

Doing the work is about doing the whole job–even the messy, ugly parts we hate doing, but if they aren’t done, we won’t achieve our goals.

Doing the work is a disciplined approach to achieving our goals.  It means we structure our time–focusing on the important, constantly eliminating the things that don’t contribute to achieving our goals.  While many activities  may be urgent, fun, fashionable, or interesting, if they divert us from achieving our goals; doing the work means we have to stop those things.  We block our time, structure our days and weeks, fitting everything we need to do in.  We do the prospecting, we do the preparation, we use our time with the customer well and purposefully.  We don’t waste our time on activities, opportunities, and customers where we can’t have an impact.

Doing the work means we have goals, measure and track our performance against the goals, adjusting and correcting things as we go forward.  We measure success based on goal attainment, not activity.

Doing the work means that we constantly learn, refine, and improve.  We know that if we don’t we will be left behind, uncompetitive–unemployable.

From the outside, being busy and doing the work, often look the same, but they are profoundly different.

Are you doing the work, or merely busy.