"We think performance measures are important, yes, but we just don't have the time for it!"
You'll never hear these words uttered in a business or organisation that is truly successful. And that's because success depends on being able to make measurable progress toward your goals. It's not an accident.
Just look at Google, Marriott, 3M or even
Beware the downward spiral of being too busy to measure...
If you don't measure what matters, you won't be managing and improving what matters. You'll be chasing what's urgent. And there's a big difference between what matters and what's urgent.
The more you delay getting meaningful measures that focus you on what matters, the more you're wasting time and wasting effort on things that don't matter most. The more time you give to what's urgent, the more you have to delay getting meaningful measures that help you focus on what's important. That's the downward spiral.
How do you make time to measure, when you don't have any time left?
When you're too busy to measure performance, you're actually too busy NOT to measure performance. You need to improve performance, or you'll stay too busy (and performance will just keep sliding).
So finding the time to measure performance is not about finding some spare time hiding somewhere. It's about deciding what you're going to *stop doing* to free up some time!
Aim to liberate a couple of hours a week that you can devote to selecting just a few meaningful measures and implementing them so they can highlight what matters most and help you improve what matters most.
Where can you find a couple of hours a week? Here are some ideas:
- Get very clear about the results that you simply must achieve - the essence of your role or team or department. You can't prioritise anything unless you know what the results are that truly matter.
- Curb distractions by planning your week and each day so that you've scheduled first the tasks that will make real progress toward your priority results. Schedule your 2 hours on performance measurement and performance improvement before you schedule anything less important.
- Delegate or delete administrative tasks that don't directly help you make real progress toward your priority results. Who else could do your data entry, preliminary research or meeting organisation?
- Stop reading emails that don't help you make real progress toward your priority results. It will feel wrong, but it's not wrong. Give it a try. You could easily find an hour a week with this tip alone.
- Cancel or defer projects or initiatives (however exciting they may be) which threaten the time you can give to making real progress toward your priority results. If you're running several races at once, you can't win any of them.
- Build a small buffer into each week, to handle those unexpected but essential tasks that pop up, or to handle the overrun of planned tasks that took longer than you expected. That way, they won't affect other important tasks you've planned (like performance measurement!).
The bottom line is that performance won't ever get better unless you make the time to measure and improve performance. And to make the time, you have to stop doing things that are less important.
