In my most recent articles (1, 2, 3), I’ve tried to stimulate some thinking about the critical importance of detailing your own set of fundamentals that you MUST focus on in order to succeed.  The purpose of this series is to encourage you to have a list of principles or “rules” you will forever rely on, and even obsess over, to maintain the focus necessary for great performance.  After all, we all know that if you fail to aim at anything in particular, you’ll most likely hit NOTHING at all.  I strongly feel that too much of our day is spent performing tasks that do little for our long-term success, for the reason that most of us have never taken the time to build, much less, stick to a list of MUSTS.

I was reminded today of one of the more important principles via an email from my 25-year old son, Ryan.  He is an account executive at a large local radio station here in Seattle.  He shared how he lost one of his most lucrative accounts and is having to apologize, both to the client, and his boss, that he let some details slip through the cracks.

Now, how does this happen?  How do you momentarily or insidiously lose track of one of your primary sources of revenue?  This sort of thing seems very simple to track, and yet we all do it.  I almost guarantee that most of us have, at some point, lapsed into the type of work day where we are so busy doing “all sorts of STUFF,” that we fail to prioritize the primary blocks that need to be built, from the extraneous, less important, fires to be put out.  This is not limited to sales.  It happens in every department, in every industry.

There is something about human nature that causes us to slowly lose track of the things that really matter most.  We lose sight of how to prioritize — what details to invest enormous amounts of time into, and what details to delegate, deal with in two minutes, or completely ignore.

The primary problem is that we all want to please and not disappoint.  It is not necessarily a sign of deep psychological distress to want to please people, be helpful, attend to squeaky wheels, and rush to out fires.  After all, when there is chaos we want to fix it, right?

However, what most of us fail to do, is weigh the degree to which investing time in each fire is worth the energy expended.  Imagine for a moment, now, if you had some magical, built-in computer program that flashed before your eyes saying, “This problem is not worth addressing personally– Delegate!”…or, “This complaint from an agent who has done little to perform and less to build up the overall goal of teamwork at the office, is not worth more than three minutes!”  OR even better, “You have failed to contact xyz company in 4 weeks…BIG MISTAKE, as this agent/client represents $$$ off your company dollar and needs attention now!”

Unfortunately, you are probably not ever going to have such a sophisticated computer.  (Maybe someday?)  But you can build something similar, only if you are willing to take the time to prioritize ALL of your activities and follow a system to be reminded.  By prioritizing all of your agents, your agent prospects, your clients, your clients’ most critical needs, and your agents’ most crucial tasks–you can begin to build your own system of sifting through all of the incoming data.  As a result, you will become much more efficient, functional and intentional with your time.