Hello and how the heck are you? Hopefully your year has been excellent and full of more ups than downs. The road to success is often bumpy and I hope you haven’t broken an axle along the way!

As we wrap up the fifth year of this newsletter, I want to thank those subscribers who have been onboard for years and welcome those folks who are just discovering Excellence Insights.

We’ll end the year with a bang including a free special report, some thoughts on time management, focus, and situational awareness. All solid fundamentals that keep the continual improvement machine revved-up, turbo-charged and cranking out awesome results.

2016 is screaming in sideways at 100 MPH, so we have to get ready! There are some exciting things going on in the background at JCG that I look forward to sharing with you in our first 2016 issue. We’re going to take the notion of free content for subscribers to new levels next year. Stay tuned!

Until then, I wish you all a happy, healthy, safe and productive holiday season!

Best,

SIgnature

Jeff Cole

President

JCG Management Consulting

ps – check out the Excellence Insights Archive page here.

Meetings and More Meetings

Ever been to one of those meetings where you seriously considered dropping to the floor and doing a fireman’s crawl out the door when nobody’s looking? Meetings that take “bad” to levels you didn’t know existed? Welcome to the club.

Some statistics indicate managers spend 35-50% of their time in meetings plus additional time preparing for those meetings. Further it’s reported that executives consider about two-thirds of their meetings to be failures.

What is going wrong and how can we make this better? The latest JCG Special Report: “Six Epic Meeting Mistakes … and how you can avoid them” looks at some of the top problems and offers solutions. One of the worst practices? Having no agenda. That lack of focus alone can derail hours of people’s time. The other five may surprise you. Click here to see this short report (it makes a great holiday gift for your boss!).

Big Rocks First

New Year’s Resolution time is coming up fast. The Statistic Brain Research Institute reports that only 8% of people are successful in achieving their resolution.

Want to avoid the 92% failure rate? You need a time management process, and Stephen Covey has one.

The essentials of Covey’s Time Management system are simple – divide your tasks into quadrants based on Urgency versus Importance.

· Quadrant 1: Urgent and Important: This is for true crises or a project deadline that demands action now. Manage your time in this space.

· Quadrant 2: Important but not Urgent: This includes activities like relationship building, funding your retirement, and building your personal skills and capabilities. Focus on this area.

· Quadrant 3: Urgent but not Important: This includes many calls, texts, emails and meetings – Covey urges caution for tasks in this quadrant – they can chew up all your time.

· Quadrant 4: Not Urgent and not Important: This includes mindless activities and time–killers. Avoid this quadrant.

Imagine the amount of time you have each week as a glass cylinder. Into this cylinder you have to place big rocks (QII), smaller rocks (QI), pebbles (QIII) and sand (QIV). Filling your time with all the sand and pebbles first leaves inadequate space for all your big rocks – important activities. Placing the big rocks in first allows you to fill in the remaining spaces with the smaller items.

Lesson learned: each week do those things most important to you first to ensure you allow adequate time to address them. This avoids getting on a hamster wheel of activity that doesn’t move you towards your true goals!

The Principle of One…

If you had to focus on only ONE thing today, what would it be? How would you make that decision? Could you do it? In their 2012 best seller The One Thing, authors Gary Keller and Jay Papasan explore the benefits of deep, profound focus in the midst of the information overloaded, multi-tasking environment that surrounds us.

A few interesting findings:

· The old saw about habits taking 21 or 30 days to form? According to a 2009 University of London study, the average is now closer to 66 days.

· Multi-tasking is really a myth – we “task-shift” like computers do. Sure you can walk and chew gum, but the notion of texting and really listening on that conference call? You end up doing neither well.

· Extraordinary results often require a deep focus and lots of time. That focus means you have to give yourself permission to leave some things undone.

· A great question to ask yourself (for whatever area you decide to focus on) is “What is the one thing I can do, such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary?” This can be applied to many different aspects or roles in your life.

· (Jeff’s note: extra powerful when applied to a Covey Quadrant II topic – ex: funding retirement is easier if you sign up for say a 10% automatic deduction into a 401K!)

Featured Link

Ever sit in a briefing only to have the speaker use a load of phrases that had you reaching for an Executive-to-English translation guide?

Business Dictionary.com has you covered. This free site provides definitions and examples of 20,000+ terms. They also have terms of the day and a unique “flashcard” option that works on mobile devices. Click here to check them out.

The Art of Situational Awareness

The hectic holiday season is upon us. One secret that helps in managing change and keeping stress levels in low gear comes, oddly enough, from mountain biking. It’s called “looking beyond the corner”. Others call is “seeing beyond your headlights,” “playing 3 moves ahead” or “what-if planning”.

A great way to die in mountain biking is to only look 3 feet ahead of you at all times. This means you are always reacting rapidly to the changing terrain – quite a stressful situation. Looking beyond the corner means raising your horizon – knowing and anticipating what is coming in advance – thus giving you ample reaction time to get ready and adjust.

I call my model for this the Concentric Circles of Awareness.

· The center “White Zone” circle includes those people showing little if any situational awareness. (You’ve likely seen them in the malls, airports and – more dangerously - highways…).

· The next larger circle is the “Yellow Zone” of people aware of their surroundings and looking slightly ahead.

· The outer circle is the “Red Zone” – people with high-definition awareness. They always seem to find the shortest lines at the store and are looking three cars ahead on the road. They think through what may be “coming around the corner” and are ready.

The advantage of getting out of the White Zone? You can capitalize on more opportunities and also have more reaction time to changes when they occur. Click here to read our short example of the awareness zones at the airport…

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