Keep it Simple

A new year brings with it the opportunity to take a fresh look at where we are at and contemplate where we would like to be. Given the challenges faced by many individuals and businesses during 2020, perhaps more than ever, there is a strong desire to review these challenges and consider the opportunities confronting us and establish new priorities.

One of the biggest temptations is to try and do everything at once. Ironically, the more we consider what we need to focus on, the less focused we become.

When teams work together to complete this exercise it can be easy to keep adding to the list of priorities and much harder to drop things off. What starts out as one or two priorities soon becomes five, ten, twenty and sometimes more.

One of my favourite sayings is aim small, miss small. If you are trying to toss a stone into a bucket and your focus is shifting to a number of areas around the bucket, it will be much harder to succeed than if your focus is locked onto the bucket, or even better, a small spot or mark inside the bucket. Even if you just miss that small spot, there is still a very good chance you will succeed and the stone will land in the bucket.

Our natural desire to try and focus on addressing everything can often result in us partially achieving some things, or not actually achieving anything.

So the challenge is to keep it simple. Distill your priorities. Three is good, two is great, one is even better.