Michael Hyatt's Blog, page 8

3 Nonnegotiables for Every High Achiever

Some days it feels like our calendars run away from us. It might even feel like they control us instead of the other way around. We can’t possibly get it all done without dipping into our personal time. And that’s what a lot of us end up doing.

A primary reason we let this happen is because we lack clarity on what matters most. As a result, we chase everything rather than focus on a few nonnegotiables. If we don’t make intentional time for these priorities, they get the leftovers of both our time and our energy—and largely go unattended. To avoid falling into this trap, let’s look at the three primary categories every high achiever needs to give attention to.

Self-care. Your health, relationships, children, and work—at the center of all of these is you. If you’re not caring for yourself, then the influence you bring to these other dimensions will be less than what it could be. Unfortunately, we often view self-care as a luxury or selfish indulgence. We make excuses or wait until we’ve made it past specific work projects and life seasons. The problem is, there’s never a perfect time for self-care. Because these activities make for a meaningful life outside work while contributing to greater performance at work, neglecting them negatively affects both domains. It’s a lose-lose.Relational priorities. Key relationships like family and good friends are essential to your personal growth and well-being. They pull us out of ourselves to invest in others, and help challenge and shape us to become the best version of ourselves. Maybe this looks like having regular family dinners at home, or going on regular dates with your significant other. Maybe it’s an annual trip with old friends, or maintaining a weekly coffee date with someone. The relational seeds you sow will be your greatest legacy.Professional results. To succeed, we must drive results at work. This is true no matter what position you hold within an organization or if you’re a business owner. It begins with clarity on the results you’re responsible to produce. Once you’re clear on where you add the most value to drive things forward, you know where to say yes and where to say no. As high achievers, we’re always pushing the present business forward to become the one we want for the future. Consider what you need to be planning or investing in today for tomorrow’s results, and how you can use your unique skills and abilities to drive results toward that.

By now you’re probably asking, “How do I maintain focus on my nonnegotiables?” By blocking out the necessary time on your calendar. This ensures you cover what matters, even amid incessant demands and tempting invitations. If you don’t, the urgent will swamp the important. Your life is worth more, and some things deserve to be the priority, not the leftovers.

What are your self-care, relational, and professional nonnegotiables?

How Constraints Help Us Achieve More

Like water, work can be life-giving. But it can also flow all over and flood our other life domains. We need boundaries to contain it. When we allow it to travel unrestricted, we’re not accomplishing more. We’re actually bringing something less than our best to both the office and home. We’re scattered and depleted instead of being productive and fulfilled.

The solution? Create constraints around your workday, workweek, and weekend. According to the cult of overwork—and culture at large—constraints stifle us. But I believe the opposite is true: constraints liberate and empower us to achieve more. These are three ways I’ve found constraints actually work in our favor:

Constraints enable focus. If you set a hard stop to your workday, you’ll have to stay focused and avoid pointless activity. You won’t have the luxury of getting distracted or wasting time on fake work. Constraints will help you make efficient use of your time at work and encourage greater focus.Constraints foster creativity. It’s tempting to imitate what others have done, especially if you admire their work. But you only have the skillset and talent that you have. Therefore, you have to work within those constraints. Embracing your limitations can drive creativity by forcing you to dig deeper into the possibilities within your capabilities.Constraints drive productivity. The cult of overwork doesn’t distinguish between low- and high-leverage work. It wants us to do a bit of everything—and everything never ends. Being productive, though, means moving away from doing everything and working more hours and instead being intentional about the kind of work you do within the hours you already have. Identifying the tasks you love and are skilled at, and eliminating, automating, or delegating the rest, ensures you’ll get more done. It encourages more and better planning and exchanges nonessential activity for what’s truly essential.

Embracing constraints prompts us to explore new and inventive ways of approaching our work, solving problems, completing projects, and much more. Instead of working against us or limiting us, constraints work in our favor. The limitations that already naturally exist, or the ones we implement, liberate us to do our best and, most importantly, to be at our best.

What constraints can you embrace or implement to help you be more focused, creative, and productive?

The First Task Your EA Should Tackle

There are few things worse than walking out of a meeting, looking down at your phone, and seeing emails numbering in the double digits awaiting your response. If you travel or take vacation, the number grows even larger. It can take hours to comb through all of those messages. You probably don’t have the time to do it. You’re just trying to keep up.

Here’s the good news. Your executive assistant (EA) can monitor your email and even handle the responses on your behalf. In fact, managing your communications needs—particularly email—is the first, and maybe most important, thing your EA should tackle. Because that means having someone else represent you to others, it can be scary to give up that control. But if you effectively communicate your expectations, you’ll be surprised at how much email gets processed while you’re focused on high-leverage work.

Here are 2 tactics I recommend to make this a smooth and successful process:

Multiple inboxes. If you can manage it, it’s best to have three: a personal email account, a private work account, and a public work account. Ideally, your EA operates your public work account and very few people know about the other two.Email templates. Templates will help you effectively delegate email to your EA. There are some common requests that most leaders receive, and it’s helpful to have a standard reply to each one in your vault. Most commonly, these are requests like, “Can I pick your brain over coffee?” or, “Can you come to this event?” You can tell your assistant which invitations to accept and which to decline—without rehashing the wording for each again and again. If you already have a set of templates you use, be sure to share those with your EA. If not, no problem. Make a list of the templates you want and have your EA create first drafts. Then you can tweak them to your liking.

Whichever approach you take to your email communications, the advantage remains the same. Giving your EA access to your email and arming them with templates ensures they can rapidly reply to common requests. Plus, you can feel at ease knowing those requests are being answered the way you would do it. It’s all the quality without the involvement.

How can you empower your EA to handle more of your email requests so you can focus on high-leverage work? What are some email templates you can create for common requests?

Why We Have a 6-Hour Workday

When I first asked my daughter, Megan Hyatt Miller, to join our company as then COO, she agreed under one condition: she had to unplug from work and leave every day at 3:00 p.m. to pick up her kids from school and enjoy her evening at home with her family. I agreed, she took the job, and she’s been working some version of that schedule ever since.

But then something else happened. Because of circumstances outside our control, our company went through a trying season. Our employees were spent, and burnout was on the horizon. We needed to act. Instead of working a traditional 8-hour day, we decided to cut our time by 25% to 6 hours. The results shocked us. Not only did we exceed our company goals, but we found that our employees were just as productive, if not more, than they were before. So we decided to embrace constraints and make the 6-hour workday a permanent part of our culture. Here is what we’ve learned—and why we’re sticking with it:

It forces us to get clear on what matters—and what doesn’t. One of our values at Michael Hyatt & Co. is doing work that is High Leverage. We invest our corporate and individual resources in opportunities with exponential return, measured by profit, impact, or both. This means it takes us less time than normal to achieve amazing results, because we maintain laser focus.It drives innovation. To produce the same results in less time, we’ve had to think differently about our work and come up with creative solutions. We’ve become ruthless about eliminating, automating, or delegating tasks that either don’t need to be done, don’t need to be done by a human, or don’t need to be done by someone who should be focusing on high-leverage work instead.It enables us to prioritize life outside work. Not only do we want our clients to achieve the Double Win, we want that for our employees too. Making work the primary orientation of our lives wreaks havoc on our health, our most important relationships, and our spirits. But having 2 extra hours per day—or 10 extra hours per week—gives us time back. Time for exercise, doctor’s appointments, preparing healthy family meals, picking up kids from school, volunteering in the community, or pursuing a hobby.It helps achieve sustainable success. Like most businesses, we have goals and a vision to get us there. But the body and mind need time to rejuvenate. If we want great ideas, we need to have great thinking. And that means having rested minds and bodies to continually, consistently, and sustainably bring our greatest contributions.It sets an example for others. We live in a world where workaholism is rampant. Its negative effects are unable to be ignored, including things like early death from stress-related illness, divorce, loneliness, and burnout. We want to demonstrate that there’s another option. There’s a hopeful way forward different from the status quo.

Constraints around the workday contribute to success. It causes us to think differently about what’s important both at work and at home, and enables us to achieve the results we really want without compromise. What are some ways you can embrace the power of constraints?

Making It Work While Working With Family

You have an opportunity to go into business with your family. You’re excited, but you’re also concerned. Will it be weird? Will there by power struggles? How will your coworkers see things? How will this affect your personal relationships? 

How to Tell You Need an Executive Assistant

Have you ever felt like, no matter how many things you check off your to-do list, you just can’t keep up? Maybe you’re proficient in some specific areas of your business but aren’t the greatest in others, so they take up more time. The challenge is, even the areas you aren’t proficient in still have to get done.

If the majority of your time is spent working on tasks that you’re both proficient and passionate about, maybe you can do without extra help. But if you constantly find yourself in a juggling act, struggling to do tasks that are holding you back from your most important and fulfilling work, you might need help. Here are 4 key indicators that you could benefit from an executive assistant (EA):

You’re overwhelmed. We all go through seasons when there’s more work than time, when you have to push through to get it all done. But that shouldn’t always be our reality. If being regularly overwhelmed and trying to go it alone is the norm for you, you’ll drown in your own success. To be at the top of your game, you need to be alert, healthy, and clearheaded. An EA can help carry some of the burden so you can stay at the top of your game.You’re distracted by administrative work. When you go it alone, you have to do everything. From booking travel to making appointments, it’s all on you. But if you want to maximize the time you spend on your high-leverage work, this one-person act isn’t sustainable. Sure, this might just be what you’re used to and you might even be very capable at completing the tasks. That doesn’t mean it’s the best use of your time, especially if you find administrative tasks draining.You’re not focusing on your strengths. Whatever business you’re in, there are some things that only you can accomplish. If you’re not focused on these, you’ll be in trouble. A good rule of thumb is that if you can teach someone else to do a task, you shouldn’t spend your time doing it. Your EA should be doing it while you focus on your unique contributions to your business.You feel too stressed to get help. Stress is caused by a lot of things. One of them is always being behind no matter how hard you work. But this does not have to be the case, and there’s a simple solution: stop. Stop trying to do everything. If you’re honest with yourself, there’s probably three to five things right now that are hindering you from maximizing your time. Stop burdening yourself with those things and let somebody else work on the things that are slowing you down.

EAs empower us to leverage our two most valuable resources: time and focus. The high-leverage work they do frees us to do our high-leverage work. What is your lack of focus and the accompanying loss of productivity costing you? How could an EA, even a part-time one, help you create the magin you need to get things back on track?

How to Create a Culture of Big Ideas

You’ve made it to the leadership role you’re in by being an idea person, but you have new responsibilities and can’t be the only one doing that now. You need to scale and develop a team full of idea people. But how do you do that? What can you do to nurture and encourage a culture of good ideas?  

3 Tips for Creating a Vision Script

We all have dreams and goals for our business. Sadly, leadership isn’t a gently sloping road. In between us and our goals, there can be countless mountains to climb. The only reliable way to the top is to start with a vision. It’s what enables you to make a way when none previously existed. But before you know where you’re headed, you have to know what you want. To get clear on that, you need a Vision Script.

A Vision Script is a robust document, written in the present tense, that describes your future reality as if it were today. The trick is to step into the future and record what you see in four key areas of your business: your team, products, sales and marketing, and impact.

Here are 3 tips for creating your Vision Script:

Get away and clear your head. Formulating a vision for your future is hard, if not impossible, amid daily tasks and projects. So to get the mental space you need to envision what the future could look like, I recommend finding a solitary place away from the office: a hotel, Airbnb, or even a coffee shop with your headphones on. Anywhere that you won’t be interrupted works. Something remarkable happens when you unplug from the barrage of noise, distractions, and pace of life to think, ponder, and connect with your own thoughts. And, if at all possible, turn off notifications and avoid checking in with the office.Believe the best is yet to come. Experience often teaches us to focus on what’s not possible. On our limits, constraints, and all the reasons our hopes are out of reach. But here’s the truth: we experience what we expect. Our past experience is only one side of the coin. We also have to commit to the idea that things can be better, even far better. Experience—even bad experience—is just information. It’s how you interpret and apply that information that makes the difference.Imagine tomorrow and describe what you see. What do you see when you think of yourself standing in the future? The future takes the shape of choices in the present. The idea is to imagine a tomorrow compelling enough to guide your choices today. So you want to write in the present tense, as though your vision has already happened.

Whatever you do, the objective will always stay the same: answering the question of what you want for your business in the future. Statements about the future tells us how we’re performing in the present and influences what we do next. It can feel daunting to sit down and write a Vision Script, but any leader who dedicates time and focus can draft a compelling vision simply by asking themselves what they want and keeping with it until answers emerge. So, what do you want?

The Opportunity Behind Our Sabbatical Not Going to Plan

You are meticulous about preparation. You make all the lists and plan all the details, but sometimes things happen that are outside of your control. It’s disorienting and confusing. What are you supposed to do then? How do you recover and keep going?

4 Pitfalls of a Vision-Deficit Leader

Passion is a key component of a leader. Leaders generally don’t get to where they are without it. The same is true of drive, good ideas, and execution. Even confidence. But none of that is enough to replace vision. Passion and all the rest can fuel the mission, but vision is the North Star to get you there.

Unfortunately, too many leaders don’t see vision as a crucial ingredient. This is a dangerous mindset to maintain, because the stakes are so high. It can be the difference between success and failure, being a pioneer or being passed by. As I’ve worked with entrepreneurs and executives, and led organizations myself, I’ve found that leaders who undervalue vision tend to stumble into one or more of these four pitfalls:

Unpreparedness for the future. No one can see the future, but having a vision can help you clarify where you’re trying to go and prepare for what’s ahead. Computer scientist Alan Kay famously said, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” Vision is the first step in doing that. Locking one’s self into the present might feel safe for now, but it ultimately stifles innovation and sets the stage for failure.Missed opportunities. Vision keeps us attuned to possibilities that align with the future we see. Otherwise, those opportunities slide right by. It can be easy to default to seeing only obstacles. Having vision, though, refocuses your perspective to see opportunity instead.Scattered priorities. Without a vision, the opposite can also be a problem: everything looks like an opportunity. When we’re unclear about our destination, we tend to make short-range decisions, pursuing whatever opportunities look good in the moment. Things that appear promising up close, however, can prove disastrous with a wider perspective. Vision can help you separate the seemingly good from the legitimately great.Wasted resources. When the focus is on execution to the exclusion of vision, leaders miss the role vision plays in execution. This can then create frustration within teams and waste valuable resources, including a leader’s own time and energy. Vision provides both a direction for execution and the standard by which to judge performance. Otherwise, teams pour themselves into irrelevant outcomes and unimportant projects. They won’t know what success looks like. Everyone ends up running in circles.

You’re much more likely to get to a destination you like if you’re intentional about where you’re heading. That’s why vision is the lifeblood of any organization. It provides meaning for the day-to-day. And it keeps you, and the people around, moving forward. Where can you expand your vision to avoid these pitfalls?