Section 9: Take Care of the Little Things Immediately

Overview

Samer had been with the company for eight years and had been promoted to division manager. Unfortunately, his work day became busier and busier as he advanced. His days were often eleven or twelve hours of back-to-back meetings.

Subsequently, he got out of touch with his people. He never seemed to have the time to attend to even the most minor of tasks and instead relied on his assistant to screen calls and direct him to the next meeting. He no longer made the time to ask people how they were doing or even say “thank you.” Yes, he was working incredibly hard on those tough, strategic issues, but he was out of touch and burned out.

The people in the organization felt less and less committed to Samer and to the organization overall. Turnover increased, and new-hires believed they had no management support and direction.

Samer fell into one of the traps of popular time-management techniques: he concentrated so heavily on the big, important tasks he forgot about the people affected by his actions. An important trick to prioritizing your work that seems to be counter-intuitive: do some of the easy things first. (Allen, www.davidco.com)

Many time-management experts will teach that strict prioritization of tasks is the path to success: distinguish between what is urgent versus important. Then work on the most important things first, the ones that will have the largest impact. Of course, these are often the ones that take a lot of work and a long time to deliver. Important things are rarely easy.

Unfortunately, this does not account for peoples’ expectations. Others expect hard things will take a long time, perhaps with pitfalls along the way, so they do not expect to see quick results. In addition, you usually do not have too many big activities underway at any time, so people expect that results of this work will be relatively infrequent. Increasing communication so they can see progress being made is important, but it is only one of the tools at your disposal.

The corollary to the previous statement is that others also expect the easy things to take a short time with few mistakes. So if you prioritize them behind the hard things, you will probably disappoint people often with tasks they thought were easy to do. This is a recipe for disaster.

Some people try to avoid small tasks by putting large barriers around themselves, such as not responding to e-mail or voice mail. Sure enough, this tells others you will not be responsive to the little things so they tend to go elsewhere. Unfortunately, this also gives a strong message that you do not want to be a valued member of the team.

The middle ground is to spend some time on the easy things. Say “thank you” for a contribution. Forward a message to someone who could get great value from it. Spend a minute asking “how are you doing?” Listen to the answer. The point is to do these things immediately so they do not enter into your time-management process. The benefit you get from doing this for some part of your day is huge: people want to interact with you, and they see you as attentive, responsive, and connected.

Do not queue up these small, simple things for several days because you will forget about them, and others will get the sense you do not care about them anymore. Do not bother tracking them on your time-management system because they come and go too quickly. They are often too trivial to track relative to your important long-term goals.

These small things are important. Not necessarily in the short term, to help you get your job done today, but in the long term. Attending to the simple things builds bonds of trust and generosity. It helps you create a group of people around you who you like to work with because they like and support you.

In all the affairs of life, social as well as political, courtesies of a small and trivial character are the ones which strike deepest to the grateful and appreciating heart.

—Henry Clay, US orator and politician