Driven by the J & R mission statement and my general desire to make our customers happy, I continually try to exceed the expectations of our current clients. This is a goal that I have had since beginning my career and believe in very strongly. Lately, this desire has produced a heavy workload and some stressful days but success has always been achieved. The problem is that I have sacrificed working on many of the other tasks (including blogging) that when asked I would say are equally important. These other tasks are easy to push off because they usually do not come with customer expectations; they are my own personal development goals. By delaying working on these tasks, my actions indicate that the personal development tasks are actually less important then the new tasks that I commit to for our current customers. I believe that in some instances this should be the decision, the problem is that I have consistently made that decision for the last 5 months.

So what if there were 2 of me? With one of me devoting 18 hours a day to exceeding each new customer deliverable and expectation, the other me would be able to concentrate on personal and business development. I believe that even if I was able to create two of me I do not have the ability to implement this simple solution. What I realized on holiday is not that I need more available time, but that I need to be more devoted to all the tasks that I believe are important - not just those that come with customer deadlines. This requires task prioritization in addition to realistic communication to my customers about my ability to meet task deadlines. This should allow my customers to evaluate if they are willing to wait for the deadline that I propose or to find another resource to complete the task (this last part is what kills me).

This line of thinking is not new, I have been trying to operate like this over the past year but have been unsuccessful. Usually when I get fired up about this I create a list of my current tasks and prioritize them with deadlines. This will work for a while but the problem is that I have not fixed how tasks arrive on my to-do list. While on holiday I read Good to Great by Jim Collins, this is an excellent book that I highly recommend. One small point that he makes in his book is the importance of a stop-doing list. I found this simple point to be very enlightening; to have a stop-doing list that each new task or goal should be evaluated against prior to making it on to the to-do list. To that end here is my beginning attempts at my stop-doing list.

1. Stop overbooking my personal development time with new tasks.
2. Stop committing to unrealistic task deadlines.
3. Stop saying "yes" just because I feel that I should say "yes". Neither the client or myself win in this situation.

This marks the end of my scheduled personal development time, I have to get back to work.