Reflections on the practice of ‘Important Things First’.

Post date: 2024-10-18

Yesterday, the company's partners in the internal training to share the ‘seven habits of highly effective people’ of the practice of insights, during the interview because the interviewer only heard the ‘important thing first’ part, I also from the positioning, decision-making, time to share under the three dimensions of the personal practice of thinking.

About ‘Positioning’

At first glance, this ‘important thing’ has nothing to do with it, but when you break down the word ‘important thing’, you will see that ‘to’ is what is important, and ‘thing’ is how to deal with it. ‘is how to deal with it. So, the first thing to think about is ‘what is important?’ For any workplace, a clear career positioning is the most important, everyone can not become an all-round person, whether it is a front-line staff or the company CEO, I know a CEO, he is very busy every day like chicken blood, non-stop for each module to put out the fire or decision-making, including products, sales, organisational management, and even R & D. I understand the ‘important things’, ‘what is important’ is how to deal with it. I understand that the first step of ‘to be the first thing’ is to know yourself clearly, not only to know their own advantages, but also to know their own disadvantages, Steve Jobs as the CEO of Apple is very clear about their own career positioning, so he focuses on the direction of only two modules of the product and marketing, the only way to be able to carry out their own advantages on the basis of the think long term and deep work.

About ‘Decision’

Back to the specific work to do, every day will receive a variety of things, we need to clearly determine which is the most important, which is the second most important, ‘important things first’ core process is constantly ‘decision -> solution’. How to determine the importance of a thing? My understanding is that the first thing should be aligned with the company's current strategic objectives and be strongly related, which is the ability to ‘do the right thing’. In addition, we should be good at applying the ‘do-nothing principle’ to ensure that the time bottle is not filled with more sand every day. Part of the ‘do-nothing principle’ is the stop doing list, which requires us to regularly check the things in hand every day, and continually do the following ‘The other part is to learn to delegate or say No. Some things can't be done without you, the mindset has to be adjusted and the skills have to be put in place, which is the ability to ‘do things right’.

About ‘Time’

Time management is a lifelong practice for anyone, and my understanding of time management is that there should be a rhythm first, just like the natural change of seasons, tides, and resonance. Initial mastery is not good, you can first plan the rhythm of the use of repetitive time by the monthly dimension, such as the first weekend of each month to write a personal summary of the previous month, the later can be to the weekly dimension, the day dimension of the continuous challenge, which is our cycle of use of time. But we will have a variety of todo every day, whether it is arranged by themselves or assigned by others, my suggestion is to use the ‘scheduling algorithm’ to guide their time management, which is characterised by the calculation of the optimal strategy, and at the same time, there should be a metric to judge the optimal standard. When we have clear deliverables, such as supervisor's assignment or cross-departmental collaboration, firstly, we set a deadline to give the other party a controllable feedback, and secondly, we leave enough buffer to give ourselves a controllable delivery, then the earliest completion date is the optimal strategy. But some things are not deadline, hope that the faster the better to get it done, you can draw on the GTD concept of all things into an inbox, and then go to judge and sort out, if there is a correlation between the things, but also need to review and update, and finally is in order to complete the implementation as soon as possible, the optimal strategy into the shortest processing time algorithm. The above two strategies sometimes occur in one thing, and the probability of digging a pit is very high, tell a story: ‘Ming needs to pay tuition fees, very urgent (not on time to pay tuition fees expulsion), however, the bank is at the bottom of the hill, you have to go down the hill to ride a bike. Borrowing a car is not a high priority in Xiaoming's mind, so he never borrowed a car, went to work on other things, and had problems borrowing a car the day before deadline, and finally :(...’. According to the scheduling algorithm, there is a ‘priority inversion’ problem in the story, and the priority of borrowing a car should be upgraded to be as urgent as paying tuition fees. The solution is to use the ‘preemptive’ strategy to cope with these uncertainties, combined with the ‘batch processing’ strategy to avoid the impact of the environment switching to the deep work, for example, in the morning, packaged to deal with the ‘preemptive’ strategy, and in the afternoon, packaged to deal with the ‘preemptive’ strategy, and in the afternoon, packaged to deal with the ‘preemptive’ strategy. For example, in the morning, you can pack up the things of the ‘pre-emptive’ strategy, and in the afternoon, you can focus on the deadlines of the deep work things.

Finally, the core of the ‘Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’ does not lie in ‘learning’, but in ‘practice’, there is nothing to think more about the ‘four words’. The ‘four words’, against their own recent practice, to see if there is optimisation.