Treating Symptoms, Finding Cures

One of the things that attracted us to the house in which we currently live was a huge Willow Oak tree that filled the backyard.  I've no idea how tall it was, but its canopy spread over the yard in such a way that there was very little area not shaded.  It made a tremendous difference in the temperatures during the summer and there were few days that were not bearable in the backyard simply because of that tree.

Shortly after moving into the house we began to experience falling tree limbs.  I'm not talking about the small bits and pieces you find on the lawn that simply require picking up and disposal, I'm referring to fairly large limbs that require cutting up with a chain saw before they can be moved.  The photo above is of the first one that did any real damage.  It is difficult to estimate from the photo, but it was about 4 inches in diameter at the base and around 10 to 12 feet in length.  When it fell, we were sitting in the living room and it sounded like someone had lobbed a grenade at us.

There was no apparent reason for the limb to break off and fall.  It appeared to be perfectly healthy.

As time went on, more limbs fell; some larger and some smaller.  The worst was a massive piece, larger than most trees, which fell onto the garage, punching half a dozen holes through the roof.  To give some perspective, at the base of it, my 16" bar chain saw would not reach across it to cut it up.  I measured the longest piece protruding into the work room at the back of the garage and it was over 10 feet long -- that was after the smaller pieces were stripped off as it went through the roof!

Again, there was no apparent reason for the limb to fall.  I decided it was a combination of old age, a few minor spots of disease, but most of all, the tree was so massive that when filled with water, the limbs became too heavy to maintain structural integrity and simply broke from their own weight.  I became tired of patching roofs and decided the tree must come down -- which it did -- several thousand dollars later.

For some reason, I woke up thinking about that tree.  In a way, it symbolizes how we spend lots of time, energy and money addressing symptoms while ignoring the root causes of a problem.  We put bandaids on the cut, but fail to wear protective clothing the next time we are dealing with thorns.  We don't find a cure for the headaches, we just take aspirin to alleviate the immediate pain.  Okay, I've belabored that point a bit, but you get the picture.  We treat the symptom and avoid the cure.

Sometimes the cure is expensive.  It requires taking out the beautiful tree that provides shade and cooler temperatures to the back yard.  The cost is real.  The question I had to face was one of a slow trickle of expense and labor over years with the risk of a catastrophic event such as a limb crashing down and taking out a large portion of the roof, or the sizable, but manageable, expense of removing the tree.

It was a hard choice and I miss that tree.  Did I mention that if I stood and embraced the tree, my arms would not reach half way around it at chest height?  When removed, the stump was over 5 feet in diameter and the rings indicated the tree was about 120 years old.  It was a sad day, but I haven't had to patch the roof a single time since.

This post goes back to some of the time management commentaries I have made previously.  The urgent issue was dealing with a limb when it fell.  The important issue was figuring out why they were falling and addressing that problem.  Once the cause was determined and a cure effected, the urgent issue of falling limbs was no longer adding to my "to do" list.  I suspect we all have similar things in our lives that need a cure.

Urgent vs. Important

Many years ago in a job interview I was told by a member of the Board of Directors of the company that he would rather hire someone who worked smart than just worked hard.  He said, "I can find plenty of hard workers, but it is hard to find workers who know how to effectively manage their time and who work on the right things."

Those words have stuck with me through the years.  I have always tried to work smart at whatever the task.

Don't misunderstand, I have always worked hard too, but I have found that if I invest the time to think through things and to identify those things that are most important -- i.e. to work smart -- I am not only more effective, but I get more done.  Age and experience have helped with that too.  Through the years I have tried and failed enough times that I can apply that "learned wisdom" to the tasks I face now.  Prioritizing is something of an art form because if done well, many tasks go away simply because they no longer are required.

Again, as I mentioned in a previous post about planning, I am thinking of the Franklin-Covey Time Management advice to identify what is "important" and what is "urgent."  I always thought about these two things differently prior to being introduced to their system.  These two definitions are key to being more effective.

Items identified as "urgent" are those that seem to be "in your face," "deal-with-me-now" things that pop up during the day.  An example would be a flat tire.  It obviously must be handled immediately.  It is an "urgent" item.  On the other hand, an "important" item that might prevent the frequency of the "urgent" items occurring is to replace the worn out tires with new ones.

That is the difference between the two.  The "important" things are what you can do that helps everything to run more smoothly long-term.  They tend to eliminate many of the "urgent" things from popping up.

If you devote -- set aside -- some time every day to focus on the "important" things, over time, your life becomes less stressful and better manageable because many of the "urgent" items stop popping up to ruin your day.  It frees even more time to work on what is truly important.

This, at its heart, is the difference between "working smart" and "working hard."  You can work hard all day long, day-after-day on the "urgent" things that seem to continually be happening and never truly make progress, or you can spend time each day addressing the larger, systemic, "important" issues that can eliminate many of those problems from ever being an issue.  Work smart and work hard, but work hard on the things that will make the bigger difference.

Backlog

One of the things that I face after a long bout of travel is to deal with the things that seem to accumulate on my desk while I am gone.  I handle most of the crucial business tasks from the road but, there are some items that end up in various piles on my desk that require my attention when I can.

One of those items is to go through the seemingly endless pile of trade publications for items of interest.  I suppose that I could leave this task for someone else, but I've found that I pick out things that others deem irrelevant.  It isn't that my eye is any better or worse than theirs, it's just that I have things in mind that items occasionally fit that aren't obviously related to my job.  One thing that might fall into this category is things that illustrate points that I want to emphasize in a presentation.  They don't have to be directly related to the specific subject -- just good illustrations of a point.

Some of the other things for which I look when scanning the publications are 1) articles directly related to my business, 2) articles written by others in my business, 3) articles written by or about friends, 4) advertisements related to our business, 5) advertisements of competitors (mere pretenders), or 6) items referring to customers or prospective customers.  Hmmm....that doesn't leave much.

I sometimes will cut articles out of the publications and put them into 3-ring binders.  This is primarily reserved for articles specifically related to our business -- especially research.  Occasionally I will scan a particular article and e-mail it to others.  I sometimes will cut out an ad from a competitor and place it in a file.  I will visually scan or sometimes read thoroughly, any articles about customers or prospects.

It doesn't seem like a big deal until you consider how quickly the publications pile up.  I faced an eight-inch stack this morning.  It took about one hour to get through them.  That included all of the activities in the previous paragraph.

The key is to handle them once, then "chunk" them.  Don't put them aside for later; deal with them now (although now sometimes gets delayed).  If you have to pick them up more than once you are wasting time.  I don't know about you, but I never seem to have enough of that!

Fighting Fires vs Focus

Where has the week gone?!? It seems like only yesterday that we were driving home from New Mexico. I guess it seemed to fly by because it was so busy.

On Monday I drove to Kansas to work at our business location there and to meet with a couple of customers. On Wednesday I returned home late and spent yesterday and today at our business location here in the Panhandle. After being off last week (although admittedly I did work some from home part of the time) I had a rather large pile of things that had accumulated while I was out of the office. I have been diligently checking items off of my "to do" list throughout the week and feel that I accomplished quite a lot -- but not everything that I had planned.

That "to do" list is critical to keeping me on task. I spend some time each morning reviewing items from the previous day, adding additional tasks that have popped up, and thinking about priorities so that I can organize my day in a fashion that moves me toward my goals. Without planning, it is easy to become sidetracked into tasks that need to be done, but may not be as important as other things. I rank my tasks according to priority -- I use a modified Franklin-Covey time management system. I always allocate some time for working on long-term projects that are not necessarily "critical" but are important to my long-term goals.

The daily "fires" can be a killer if you do not spend time on the things that will prevent the fires from occurring. The best way to describe that is to give an example from my past. In a previous job I was given the task of evaluating an operating distribution warehouse in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. I was to determine if it should remain open and if so, how it could be turned around from a loss situation to a profitable one. It was a disaster. The warehouse was disorganized, the products were not in assigned locations, the computer system was not set up to match the warehouse, the inventory was off by several hundred thousand dollars, and the employees had no clue what to do. They were working 14 hour days in survival mode.

The "fires" were to get products out the door to meet the orders that were coming in on a daily basis. The solution was to get the warehouse and computer system in order and the employees properly trained. It took almost 3 months to get everything lined out and functioning on a reasonable basis. Then it was a matter of "trimming" the operation so that it became more efficient. I focused on the most important factor in the situation -- correcting the issues in the warehouse. Piece by piece, as the "operating system" was corrected, the fires began to disappear.

While correcting the warehouse operations I also had to work with the salesmen to adjust how they were working their territories. They were doing everything backward. Without going into detail, we turned the division completely around in less than two years. It went from a loss of approximately $350,000/year to a profit of over $400,000/year in that two year time frame just by re-focusing everyone's efforts.

My point is that when you focus on the deep issues -- the things that will move you toward your goals -- the panic response to daily fires disappears. That doesn't mean the occasional issues won't come up, but they become fewer and much farther between.