Operating With Urgency to Move Your Business Forward

Are you operating with urgency?

Walk with me through this scenario.

You’re a business owner and it’s Monday morning. You’re leaving town early Friday and plan to disconnect (i.e. NOT WORK) for a few days. You have a laundry list of things to do, loose ends to tighten up, and making sure all your systems are in place so you can enjoy your vacation.

Over the next 4 days you get 10 days worth of work done! You operate with organization and intensity, leaving no stone unturned. Hell, you even get ahead of yourself to make life a little easier once you return home. You can leave on Friday knowing everything is as prepared as possible.

It’s truly incredible what we can get done with a looming deadline.

Now imagine you’re NOT going anywhere on Friday. This is the conundrum.

With no definitive timeline, there is a lack of urgency. Most of us, myself included, operate as if we have all the time in the world (read HERE for a few more thoughts on how our time is ticking away), and that’s often the exact reason we never fully accomplish what we want in life. We’ll do it tomorrow. We’ll get to it later. We spend time being “busy” but getting absolutely nothing done.

Knowing that information, it seems wise to hack our operating system and understand we have to create our own urgency. For those of us that are business owners, it’s especially important. Running your own show is great because you don’t have anyone to answer to, but it’s also terrible at times because you don’t have anyone to answer to!

The first is something I learned called The 10 Minute Drill. This may sound simplistic, but I use it with great success regularly. Put 10 minutes on the clock (it could be 15 minutes, but no longer than that). Take out your phone, your computer, your note pad, etc. Then for those 10-15 minutes, you get AS MUCH DONE AS POSSIBLE. Follow up texts, follow up emails, prioritize your task list, make a social media post. I’ve reignited former clients during this concentrated effort that has directly resulted in business growth.

The second strategy is slightly more extreme, but a little more fun as well. We all have something we’ve been dragging our feet on. Perhaps it’s writing a book, launching a program, starting a new business. These things have no urgency because if they don’t happen, you’re the only one who suffers. To remedy that, choose a charity you LOATHE. I’m talking PETA/Westboro Baptist/The Clinton Foundation. Write a check to that organization and send the check to your best friend. Let them know if you don’t complete your task by a certain timeframe, they have permission to mail the check to the organization.

Do you really want to explain why your donation to Hilary Clinton is because YOU didn’t take the action you said you would??

It’s difficult to always operate with a sense of urgency, but we can certainly do things to manufacture that urgency and move our lives and businesses ahead faster than most.

Photo by Rod Long on Unsplash

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