The Effective Executive

3 Lessons

1. Effectiveness is doing the right things well. It is a focus on contribution
2. Effectiveness is not the default state, but it can be learned.
3. Most people are not effective because they don’t know their strengths and they don’t know where they time is going.

3 Actionable Takeaways

1. Know thy strengths, and know thy time
   1. To know strength = Feedback analysis
      1. Take on new roles; predict your abilities; review 6 months later
      2. i.e. you volunteer at a chiropractic screening; predict your ability to make small talk with random people; review later to determine if your prediction stacked up with your actual performance.
      3. List some different roles and responsibilities and find what you don’t know if you are good at or not and go test it.
      Most people think they know what they are good at; they are usually wrong – Peter Drucker
   2. To know thy time = Time Log
      1. Track your work time for a week or two. Start with maybe just your 3 most important hours of work
      2. Set an alarm every hour and write down everything you got done in that hour. Even write down the little things.
      3. Then determine the amount of time each hour that was spent doing things that were a unique contributor to success. How much time did you spend doing things that only you could do; work that contributed, and used your strengths.
2. Create a stop doing list with your time log
   1. include all the common distractions, useless meetings, urgent but insignificant problems, and good but not great opportunities.
3. Create an offload list
   1. All the things that could be done by someone else just as well eif not better than by yourself.
      1. Cleaning, data entry, formatting documents, etc.
4. Create a To Do list
   1. After creating the stop doing and offload list, use your time audit to create a list of things that only you can do to make a unique contribution using your strengths.