HshsContinuous Improvement is simple, but it only can happen once you stop procrastinating.
Procrastinating means to put off things that you want to do, but you just don’t do it, for whatever reason – lack of time, lack of energy, lack of motivation.
Probably every person in the world had some or all of these thoughts: “I really need to fix that, I should call someone, I should arrange something or start working on that important project”. There is, however, something hindering you from just starting. It really doesn’t matter what that is. The bottom line is: you are not moving, and that’s all that matters. Obviously, results and improvements only can be achieved once something has been done. There are more than enough tasks that can be postponed without any immediate implication or consequence. Cleaning your room, cutting the grass, painting the garage door. These tasks certainly are important, but they are not really urgent. So they become perfect for procrastination. Unfortunately, continuous improvement is within the category of tasks that can easily be procrastinated. Even without improvement life goes on, right? In the long term, however, the consequence is certainly not great. Continuous improvement tasks are usually important but not urgent. Stephen R. Covey in his book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People ” describes the 4 categories of tasks we can find in our working environment. Important, not important, urgent, or not urgent. A task that’s important and urgent is usually the task we go for. It is the crisis management, the fire fighting, deadline-driven actions requiring immediate attention. We drop everything else to take care of these tasks. The handling of these problems includes Crisis meetings, Deadline driven quick actions and projects, immediate management attention, and close follow-ups.
A task that is not important but still urgent is something that we encounter more than we hope for. These include a phone call interruption. Emails with random topics. Scheduled meetings about unrelated topics, filling out timesheets or other reports among many other tasks we are prompted to do, but which don’t really contribute to the business objectives.
We spend a huge amount of our daily work on these urgent useless matters.
Insight of the sheer endless amount of urgent tasks, we tend to neglect the most important tasks regarding our long-term success and prosperity. These often are important but not urgent ones. These tasks typically include the long-term strategic changes needed to ensure competitiveness, projects, ideas, and initiatives stored in a draw, waiting for an opportunity to be implemented. Preventive actions, preparing, planning, reviewing, and improving. These categories of tasks are aimed at the future, but their execution can only happen in the present. The story repeats over and over, across industries, across sectors, across corporate environments. Urgent tasks divert the focus from what is important towards what is urgent. It is exactly at this point that continuous improvement loses track and fire-fighting mode kicks in. Continuous Improvement focuses on avoiding future problems, improving the current situation. It is the perfect task for procrastination while at the same time it is one of the most important tasks for long-term success.
If you are seeking to implement an environment of continuous improvement, you need to focus your energy on tasks that are important but may not be urgent. To do this, you need to beat procrastination and start moving today.
