Knowing the Solution to Reducing Your Firefighting

Approximate reading time: 1.5 minutes

Let’s recap those 4 solutions for reducing how much we firefight (Box 1 – Urgent and Important behaviour):

• Meerkat – Look ahead for which tasks are coming at you. Those tasks that are important but not yet urgent. Box 2 of Eisenhower’s matrix; Important but not yet Urgent.
• Rabbit – Get the rabbit running by asking for something that you’ll need when you get to that task, e.g. Marketing data for a presentation, from the Marketing department.
• Cheese – Alan Lakein said that we should make the first task very simple & practical because that would make one hole in the cheese, and after many small tasks, the big tasks will look like Swiss cheese.
• Snowball – Once you start a big task it gathers its own momentum. A home example would be that if I call an estate agent to start selling my house, all the other tasks start to line up and begin happening.

A practical example of using these 4 solutions is:

Meerkat

Every Tuesday morning you look at your diary for next week to identify one big task that is important but not yet urgent. You identify that you need to write a presentation for a meeting with a customer in 2 weeks.

Rabbit

You know that you need samples for that meeting and you write a quick email to the New Product Development team telling what you need and when.

Cheese

You make a note that in your weekly one-to-one with your boss, you ask her for her expectations of the customer meeting next week, ready for when you start writing the presentation next week.

Snowball

You find that you have started to think about the presentation and on the train home you jot down a few notes ready for when you write the presentation next week.

Moving Forward as You Improve

Over time you’ll find that you start to look 2 weeks ahead as a Meerkat, then 3, and so on. Being even more Meerkat. Simples! Also, you set more & more rabbits running, poke more cheese quickly, and see more snowballs take on their own energy.

Your Action

Capture these 4 techniques on your Keepers ®, and with drawings, if you haven’t already done so.

Soar With the Eagles