It’s just as important to decide what you’re not going to do as it is to decide what you will do
Don’t do a hundred things at a time. Multitasking is way overrated. It’s especially important to keep that in mind as your influence grows, because even more people are looking up to you. If you’re at a meeting and people are waiting to hear your opinion, but you’re on your phone, then you have just wasted the time of those ten people — which, by the way, you are literally paying for. No one’s going to tell you that you’re wasting their time, because you’re the boss, but that’s what you’re doing. So I try to be present wherever I am. If I’m on a call, I’m not checking my email.
I was once at a wedding and I was watching the father of the chassan dancing in the middle — he was constantly looking at the circle to see who would be the guy he would pull in next. At the end of the night, he’d danced with hundreds of people, but there wasn’t a single person I saw that he looked in the eye and really connected with. When you’re doing so many things at once, you’re never present.
—Mordy Herzog, CEO of Royal Wine Co
It’s just as important to decide what you’re not going to do as it is to decide what you will do. In order to work out what was priority, I would stop submitting certain reports and see if anyone would call and say, “Hey, where’s this-and-this report?” If three months passed and no one said a word, I knew that obviously the report wasn’t a priority anymore. I taught the trick to a lot of people and I’m sure they turned the tables and got the same benefit out of trying it on me. I’m sure that over the years there were reports that went missing and I never noticed.
—Neil Schloss, retired Finance Executive at Ford Motor Company
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