One of my kids, (honorable number one son), is a poet; a comedic poet. He is in graduate school at UC Davis in the creative writing department. He is the first to say that he is disorganized.
Even though he is an artist, that skill does not give him a license to be disorganized. As an entertainment CPA business manager, I have heard that excuse many times from clients. Sadly, what I have found are those who are disorganized in business tend to live an unbalanced life full of stress and “emergencies.”
Whether it is your business life or your personal life, in order to fulfill your potential, you need an organization strategy. May I suggest the following:
- Vision: If you have read my previous articles , you will find that I always ask persons to start with a “vision.” This is as true in your business life as it is in your personal life. A vision goes out ten to twenty years. A good start may be Jim Collin’s hedgehog concept in his book Good to Great. Read up on his three concentric circles on how a business (and arguably an individual) can become great.
- S.W.O.T: Understand your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats are to accomplishing your business or personal vision. Make the difficult decisions to eliminate the weaknesses and threats.
- Craft a Strategy to your Vison: This strategy should be a result of working backwards to long-term objectives, or milestones.
- Create a System: Every business and life needs to be organized if they are to accomplish its vision. In other words, a system. It may be as simple as doing specific tasks each day or a task on the same day of the week.
- Evaluate with metrics: You must know where you are in relation to your vision with some type of measures. Businesses can have a whole host of measures. A personal life have on like spending time with your kids all day Saturday or Sunday. Or maybe, coach a Little League team.
As far as business, there are a couple of books that can help, The E-Myth by Michael Gerber and Predictable Success by Les McKeown. You may find in going through these steps that you need to adjust your business or personal vision. That’s OK. The sooner the better. If you let your business or your life “run itself,” you are setting yourself up for a disappointment(or maybe midlife crises).
If you visions are limited, e.g., spending a lot of time playing fantasy football, then you don’t have a vision; you have a pass-time. It “passes time.” Time is your biggest enemy and ally in a strategy depending how the strategy is implemented. A balanced business leads to a balanced life. A balanced life leads to a quality life.