The two “F’s” of life scare us all, Failure, and caused by the fear of failure; Finishing.
Because we do not want to fail, most of us avoid finishing. We procrastinate, take on “busy-work” or “easy-work” to avoid the necessity to finish the important things, and risk the failure that goes with it.
The net has given us a host on new reasons not to finish things, all those emails, the face-book and Linked-in contacts that need attention, and now even twitter takes on importance in the fight against finishing.
We all need to get “un-busy” finish stuff, get it out the door, risk that failure, then get on and potentially fail again, before we can really finish something that makes a difference.
It constantly amazes me how easy it is to be diverted from what is important, but not urgent, by the unimportant but seemingly urgent, and the focus on email and facebook has just made it worse.
The distractions multiply, and it seems increasingly difficult to impose the personal discipline to ignore them, and get on with doing stuff that adds value to customers, which typically has aspects of “Finish” in it.
Customers do not care if you read all your emails the moment they come in, they only care if you react to theirs, in a reasonable time, reasonable being determined by practice, and terms. It is the outcome of the communication that matters, not the communication itself.
Sadly too true. It translates into an unwillingness to make decisions, and then panic when a decision is made late. Just more reactivity and lost opportunities