How often have you made a commitment to yourself and then failed to deliver on it? You commit that “I’m going to write that email tonight” then you’re lying in bed thinking that you didn’t write the email. Or you sit in a team meeting thinking to yourself “I’m going to give my teammate feedback on his presentation” and then never say a word.
You probably have many ideas during the day for how to make yourself or your team more effective. You probably even have the best of intentions about doing those things. You just don’t actually do them. How much more effective would you and your team be if you followed through on all those commitments to yourself?
The key to follow through is spending about 10 seconds planning and visualizing how (and when and where) you’re going to do what you want to do. Vague ideas and positive intentions don’t make for good plans. A good plan is very detailed and very concrete—a good plan removes any wiggle room so that you know exactly when it’s time to do it and feel strong pressure from yourself to get it done.
Think of something you really should do. [Seriously, think of one thing.]
Now think about when you’re going to do it, how you’re going to do it, with whom you’re going to do it. (Heck, think about what you’ll be wearing, what the room will smell like, or where the office chairs will be!) Make your plan super concrete and tangible.
Here’s a true example I used on myself… My minivan becomes a minefield of detritus each winter and it’s just not very fun to stay out in the cold and clean it. So I told myself that the first day on a weekend that the temperature got above 50 degrees, I was going to clean the van. When the weather forecaster declared a couple of weeks later that it was going to be 55 that Saturday, I had nowhere to hide, so I cleaned the van.
Weekend day over 50 degrees…there was no wiggle room there! That’s what you need: a plan so concrete that it has no wiggle room. How could you apply this technique to doing some of the things you might otherwise let slide?
Here are some examples I have seen:
Issue: procrastinating an administrative task. Plan: “On Friday morning, when I don’t have a meeting first thing in the morning, before I open my email program, I am going to go right into our performance management system and fill in my annual objectives.”
Issue: shying away from delivering an important piece of feedback. Plan: On Monday, when we’re walking out of our team meeting in the Michigan Room, I will say to Rob “can I buy you a coffee this afternoon? I would like to debrief on our customer meeting yesterday.”
Issue: wimping out on going to the gym while on a business trip. Plan: As soon as I finish writing this blog and before I go get dinner with my colleagues, I will put on my awesome pink running shoes and go straight to the gym.”
[Ok, that last one was a test…but now my commitment is out there with no wiggle room and I have to do it!]
When you tell yourself that you should do something, you probably mean it. You really should do it. When it’s not something you’re really looking forward to, you put twenty-three other things ahead on the priority list. And it’s especially easy to convince yourself you’re doing the right thing if those other 23 tasks are useful and productive.
But if you really want to do something, create such a specific plan that you can visualize yourself doing it. Make your plan detailed and really concrete so there is no wiggle room. It won’t work every time, but you’ll see that you turn way more of your positive intentions into reality.
Further Reading
After the Offsite Part 3: Helping your Teammates Live up to Their Commitments