Ged: [00:00:00] Okay, we going straight into the next one.
Milan: Let’s go to the priorities then.
Ged: Priorities. Yeah.
Milan: We’re
Ged: I like,
Milan: Timing, so let’s
Ged: Yeah.
Milan: Done and then we’ll not, we won’t push for the third one so you can you don’t have to leave in rush.
Ged: I mean, I, I’m relatively clear at the moment, so if we need to schedule another session in the next couple of weeks, that should be fine.
Milan: Yeah, we should. Yeah.
Ged: Okay. So I loved this quote here. What is it? Dan Martel. Don’t prioritize your schedule, schedule your, your priorities. We definitely need to get that one in.
Milan: Yeah, no, it’s, I, it, it, I use it so often. It’s really, really powerful. People don’t understand that. ’cause you know, you say, I’m going to do that. If you don’t assign the resources to the project and the first resource you need to assign to it is your own time for crying out loud.
Ged: Mm-hmm.
Milan: Chances of it happening are, you know, significantly lower.
Right.
Ged: Yep. Absolutely. Mm-hmm. [00:01:00] Okay. Should we do the normal lead in?
Milan: Yep. How about I do, how about I do that one and you just
Ged: Sure.
Milan: When, when we, when we jump to prioritization, like what does it invoke in you? Why is that? You know what, what, what is interesting on it? And then we’ll just banter because there is so many different directions this can flow. So we’ll just see
Ged: Yep,
Milan: Us.
Ged: Yep, yep. Mm-hmm. So you’re doing the intro? Yep.
Milan: Yep.
Ged: Cool.
Milan: Hello and welcome to another episode of Card Cast. When we pick up one of the many cards with us, let’s do it again.
Ged: It’s okay.
Milan: Okay. You know what, gimme a second. I can bring a deck. Have one somewhere. Do this right. So the older one doesn’t have numbers yet. You can’t play solitaire with it. [00:02:00] The new one, you can a full deck actually. Well, hello there and welcome to another episode of Card Cast. The podcast when we pick one of the leadership cards just like this, and then we just talk about it as two coaches might. Sometimes we bring a guest, but today we don’t have one, so we’ll just shuffle the deck and see what comes up.
Ged: Okay. You want me to do this one? Okay. Yeah, yeah,
Milan: You froze
Ged: Yeah.
Milan: Go ahead.
Ged: No, no, no. I thought, I thought you, you normally do that first, first bit, so, okay. I’ll, I’ll jump in.
Milan: Yeah. Okay.
Ged: Yeah. Okay. Yep, yep, yep.
Milan: Us. Yeah.
Ged: Mm-hmm. Prioritization. This should be a good conversation. I feel so. [00:03:00] I didn’t have time to do it. Now, that’s a bit of an excuse, isn’t it?
That’s a bit of an excuse. But we hear that a lot from CEOs and from leaders, you know, not just CEOs, you know, it’s a, it’s a phrase that is used and overused far too much. And
Milan: I, I, I wondered if you, if you would bring it up. Yeah, absolutely.
Ged: I think. I’m, I’m casting my mind back to a, a quote from Dan Martel. Don’t prioritize your schedule, schedule your priorities, you know, and such a few words has a huge, huge meaning. So what is it about prioritization that we get wrong so often now we often don’t prioritize the things that need prioritizing.
And that, in a nutshell is the, is the problem. We get taken up by the whirlwind. We get taken up by the day to day, and those things that we said were really important at the beginning of the quarter, at the beginning of the month, somehow [00:04:00] we don’t prioritize them, so we prioritize the less important things.
Milan: You used the word well. Have you read 40 x recently? Because that’s the big point, right? It’s like the
Ged: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.
Milan: Then we,
Ged: Yep.
Milan: And, and that’s, that’s, that’s great.
Ged: Mm-hmm.
Milan: Book on the concept of prioritization from a particular direction, picking the one thing that matters and doing it right.
Ged: Yeah. Four dx, the four disciplines of execution. Yeah.
Milan: Exactly. Yeah. You, you, you know, you’ve said couple of things that all of them require some kind of reaction. So when I hear I didn’t have time to do this, I said stop right there. Learn a new way of expressing yourself. I prioritized something else,
Ged: Mm-hmm.
Milan: Right? Because this didn’t happen to you. You made a choice not to do this.
Ged: Mm-hmm.
Milan: You prioritize something else, and it could have been sleep and that would’ve been healthy, or it could have been your health, it could have been the fact that you went to the [00:05:00] hospital, but, but let’s, let’s acknowledge the agency you have over your own time because if you don’t have it, then what the hell are you doing?
Right?
Ged: Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Milan: That is a super important notion. Shame. So I didn’t have time and no, I used my time differently.
Ged: Yeah.
Milan: Something else. Own it.
Ged: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And what was so important?
Milan: Yeah. Yeah.
Ged: Yeah. What was so important that you prioritized that over these really, really important things.
Milan: Well, that, that’s sort of a second level, right? Because we use, we use this naturally. We use this. Excuse of not having time. It’s almost like a microaggression sometimes, like, you know, like, I have time for that. I remember A-C-E-O-I started working with, I was like [00:06:00] are you a reader? Oh, I don’t have time for that.
I said, okay. So the first thing we need to do is to, we need to make time for you to read. So here is a book, read it, and when you finish, then call me. Don’t want to talk to you before that. Right? Because you prioritize. So that takes us to then Martel and the scheduling your priorities rather than prioritizing your schedule. So what is the difference? Prioritizing your schedule is what we do naturally. Oh, this is the stuff. It’s front of me today. This is what I have time for. Da da. And then if I have left time, maybe I’ll do something. Okay. Scheduling your priorities means, Hey, this is what I’m planning to accomplish this quarter. I need to assign resources to it, and the primary resource is my own time, so why wouldn’t I put in a calendar that I am going to do that? We talked about this in a meeting prep. Like if you have a big meeting scheduled, you probably need a time to prepare it. So just block it in your [00:07:00] calendar and make it defensible.
Right. Make it sure that it actually happens. ’cause if you just let it, yeah, I’m, you know the chances of success thank dramatically, for lack of better word, if you say, Hey this will take. 18 hours of my time to do, I have 13 weeks and it’s actually fine. So I’m going to budget, you know, two hours a week for the first thing, then I’m going to take a break. Like, you know, you need to be intentional about
Ged: Yeah,
Milan: What Dan is talking about,
Ged: Yeah, yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I, I block out.
Milan: Whole thing.
Ged: Yeah, I block out my calendar from Monday to Friday, seven in the morning until seven in the evening, but I’m also putting nice things in there if I’m going for lunch. There is a block in my calendar that says lunch. Now, if I’m going paddle boarding, there’s a block in my calendar saying paddle boarding, but it’s still in my calendar.
I have prioritized the things that I want to do that day, that week, you [00:08:00] know, so that everything, by the end of the week, as much as as can be done, gets done. And if you, if you’re not intentional about that, about scheduling your priorities, then it just doesn’t happen. You know, the other tasks just expand to fill the time that you’ve got.
Milan: Well, that’s one dynamics that happened. The other one that I’m sure that you are familiar with is too many priorities, right? We’ve seen it usually early, working with clients for the first time. Or you know, like you, you are doing your first thing and people show up. I have these 12 priorities for this quarter.. No, you don’t. Right. Or if you do, you are not gonna get them all done. Right. Unless
Ged: Absolutely. Mm-hmm.
Milan: Of, of how to do it. Right. What happens? This brought me back to, go ahead.
Ged: How do we, how do we show [00:09:00] people that. Prioritizing, sorry. Sh Prioritizing is intentional and a conscious decision making process now, rather than being reactive and just letting life take over them. Now, how do, how do we make that super clear to people? Because we come across it so often and it’s obviously a real blocker for people.
But now what, can you think of a, an analogy or a story or a metaphor for how we can make it super clear that this is something that needs. Time and needs attention.
Milan: Well, one of the analogies you can use is Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs because everybody understands it.
Ged: Hmm.
Milan: So where on that level is this one particular thing? I am usually a little more brutal because when we are need to pair priorities down to define what they actually are, I usually said, okay, you have a seven of them.
So if I put a gun to your head, which is the [00:10:00] one you would drop? I give you one. And guess what? We’re gonna do it four times until we end up with three. And generally we end up with a three that really matter. Right? And then maybe sometimes there is a combination. There is a process. I think that it is on the, on onset of really understanding.
And I think that one of the, one of the issues here that we have to be conscious about as coaches is that the word priority gets really overused.
Ged: Yeah. Mm.
Milan: Right. And the same thing. If everything is priority, nothing, nothing really is, you know, it takes us back to Incredibles and everybody’s special and nobody is, you know, it’s, it is exactly, it is exactly the same logic.
So we need to figure out like what really, really matters. Get a commitment from the rest of the team because it also means that, you know, we need to, we need to help. So we really need to say, okay, this is what is important. It doesn’t matter what level we are talking. Are we talking the strategic priorities?
Are we talking that or are we talking the fact that I really need to go paddle boarding [00:11:00] with my daughter? I don’t, it’ll be a pathetic look, I have a really bad balance. But, but you know, using that as an example, I think that’s a great example of scheduling your priority. Like, I am going to do this and I am going to have that, and I will not allow something else to jump into the calendar and take over that resource that I dedicated to this particular piece.
Ged: I’m, I’m thinking back to the work we do when we are, you know, running, you know, annual planning and quarterly planning sessions. You know, it doesn’t take much from being a coach. To get a group of people to actually come to a point where they agree on the relative priorities of 3, 4, 5. No, no. Never more than that.
Priorities, you know, the, we always get to a, to a general consensus. Doesn’t mean that everyone agrees, but generally people agree. When, you know, when we have 3, 4, 5 things. Now you use the, you [00:12:00] know, if I put a gun to your head, which one would you drop? And you do that several times to get, you know, get down to the, to a smaller set.
When I do the opposite, I, and I’m sure you, you may well do this too, is, you know, if you could only do one thing of all those things up on the wall, which one would you do now normally? Groups come to an agreement about which one of those is the most important. And it might take a bit of debate and you might sort of gonna, you know, put the most important one at the top and then gradually decreasing priority on the way down.
And it might swap around a bit, but you normally come to a point where the group agree on which is the one thing. And then from there, it’s a lot easier. Now once you’ve got the one thing, if the, you know, if you could only do one thing, if you had to get rid of all of the others apart from one, which one would it be?
You normally get to a point.
Milan: Yeah, I just find the go to hat Ged: Hmm.
Milan: Easier. It’s there is something in the psychology of. Okay. What is the thing that, that [00:13:00] is the easiest to get rid of rather than saying, oh, what, which is the one that really trumps them all? It’s, it’s, it is slightly different cognitive process. I don’t quite understand it, but from my experience I find it easier.
The debates are, are faster to get to it. Right. And especially if you have somebody who is really trying to do that you know, then you have the conversation with them and you see how everybody around the room. Understand. So like, oh, I don’t know if this one or that one are the most important, but when I say, Hey, if you can do only one of them, what’s gonna happen?
You know, which one you going to to get rid of? Like, once you get to a smaller number, you can do that. But I think that the pairing it down to a manageable,
Ged: Mm-hmm.
Milan: You know, I think that that finding the most important one among five to seven, it’s too hard. Among three maybe right.
Ged: Yeah,
Milan: I have no science behind it. This is just, this is just an anecdotal [00:14:00] experience, you know?
Ged: Different coaching techniques and I can see a, I can see a use for both of them both ways.
Milan: Yeah.
Ged: Mm-hmm. So ultimately, really what we’re saying is, you know, it is really important to keep the main thing, the main thing. As has often been said, the main thing is to keep the main thing, the main thing.
Milan: Yeah, I haven’t heard that before, but yes, it makes, it makes total sense. So, you know, if you, if you look at it, so we have two issues. We don’t set up a priority, right? We are being too. Hey, of course we can do all that, but you know, because you didn’t schedule it, you are not actually looking at the resources that were required. Second piece is that every time we decide to do something, we need to realize that at the same time, behind the scenes, subconsciously unspoken, we are deciding not to do something else. Everything has an opportunity for us. That helps, you know, [00:15:00] realizing this helps. Okay? Okay. This is the most important thing, which means what are we willing to sacrifice to make sure that it happens? There’s another version of the gun to head type of situation, right? Like you can do that all. Imagine you can do that. Also. What it doesn’t mean we won’t try, doesn’t mean that we want to understand that, but we need to because there will be times. During the quarter or whatever period we’re talking when you’ll be making choice. So it’s good to set up the ground rules now and be clear about it because then you can tell team, Hey this is a higher priority. We agreed on that, that’s what I’m doing. Don’t have to figure out at that time when you need to be actually doing stuff. Oh, should I be doing this or should I be doing that? This is higher priority if the, the decision was made. At the end of last month, [00:16:00] it’s much more effective that way.
Ged: So this is about consciously choosing what to do, but also consciously choosing what not to do or what not to do yet.
Milan: Okay? What not to do during the same time or with the same resources, like, you know, think of time the same way as you think about money, right? Like know, we can buy only one of these two things. Which one is more important?
Ged: Mm-hmm.
Milan: Have half of each. Right. Exactly the same thing. That’s why this is a diamond card time money, same thing.
Ged: Yep,
that’s wrap.
Milan: I guess so. Yeah, I guess so.
Ged: Was there something else you wanted to add in?
Milan: I don’t know. It’s just, I think it’s sort of, you know, naturally
Ged: Mm-hmm.
Milan: Finished. Yeah. Okay.
Ged: Yep.
Milan: It’s
Ged: Yep.
Milan: We are 45 minutes in and we have two episodes like [00:17:00] we are rocking today.
Ged: We are, we are. Let’s let’s get the teaser done and we can then work out whether we’re gonna do another.
Milan: Can Go home.
Ged: Okay. Shall I lead us in here?
Milan: Sure.
Ged: Yep. Mm-hmm.
I have just finished recording the latest episode of the podcast podcast. Now we talked about prioritization. Critical topic, and we started off by referencing Dan Martel’s quote, don’t prioritize your schedule. Schedule your priorities. Now where do we go from there?
Milan: My goodness. We went through all sorts of failure modes, how priorities do not actually get prioritized. How [00:18:00] just because something is important doesn’t make it priority and vice versa. Right. How teams and people have difficulties deciding between what to prioritize and then even when the decision is made, how we fall into traps of, I didn’t have time to do this.
I didn’t have time for my priorities, which really run
Ged: Yeah. Yeah, I didn’t have time. Just means you prioritized something else.
Milan: Precisely. Okay.
Ged: Mm-hmm. Okay. Now reframe.
Milan: And started.
Ged: It did, didn’t it?
Milan: Somehow reacts to gestures sometimes, so it doesn’t, yeah. Anyway, I need to Ged: Yeah.
Milan: Manual that came with it.
Ged: Yeah. I’m not sure I’m gonna have enough time for another one.
Milan: No, no, no, I
Ged: It’s gonna be pushing it. [00:19:00] Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Milan: Don’t think so.
Ged: Okay. Anything we need to wrap up on before I stop recording?
Milan: Stop
Ged: No.
Milan: And then we’ll just have two or three topics I want to brief you upon.
