Quick Tips: Bust the Hustle Today
My freshman year of high school, my best friend’s mom gave me a copy of Franklin Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and a Franklin Covey planner. I don’t know that I’ve ever thanked her sufficiently for that gesture, but I’m nearly 100% sure that this gesture is responsible for 80% of my success in my adult life. Not that I live faithfully by the tenets of Covey’s philosophy (and I’ve moved on to planners I like way more than the Franklin Covey planner), but I learned how to structure my life, my projects, and my thinking in a way that I never had before.
The thing that struck me then and continues to structure my thinking in how I organize my time is the Franklin Covey quadrant system, which comes out of the Third Habit: Put First Things First.
Make a quadrant chart (yeah, like back in algebra class). On the X-axis, write “Urgent.” On the Y-axis, write “Important.” Now here are your resulting quadrants:
Urgent and important
Urgent and unimportant
Non urgent and important
Non urgent and unimportant.
Now think how you work when you’re in each of these quadrants with a task.
Non urgent and unimportant — This is the “why are you doing this” category for me. This is something as a non-profit pro that I would often delegate to interns or volunteers. It’s not super worth my time, and it doesn’t matter when it gets done. A great project for a volunteer!
Urgent and unimportant — For me, 80% of this category is email and social media. And the other 20% is meetings. (Okay, that’s not exact, but I’m guessing you’re nodding along, so we’re going with it.) It feels so urgent, but look at it in the grand scheme of things…is this really where your time is best spent?
Urgent and important — This is when you’re in crisis or emergency mode. There’s something happening that is mission critical, and it needed to be taken care of yesterday. YIKES! (But we’ve all been there…) This is when our stress cycles kick in, and if we live here too long, we burn out.
Non urgent and important — This is where we want to be. Working on the stuff that is important, but we’re not on a tight deadline. This is where true effective, efficient productivity takes place. Staying here makes you feel on top of things, and lets you do your best work.
It’s never good when something becomes urgent (regardless of its importance). Here’s one I see a lot: you put off and put off drafting that year end fundraising appeal, now it’s two weeks to Christmas, your board chair insisted on seeing it, and just emailed you that s/he is leaving on vacation tomorrow. I promise you, no matter how good a writer you are, you can’t come up with a good fundraising letter in an hour. You’ve blown it and you haven’t even gotten started.
Unfortunately, in the nonprofit world we tend to operate in the urgent and important quadrant. From the top down, our missions are important and urgent. We must solve a homelessness crisis. We must get kids into good afterschool programs. We must provide elder care for our community’s senior members. We must support victims of trauma with mental health services.
We start with urgent from our founding, and then we just live in the urgency.
But there are major downsides to living with urgency:
It’s hard to be effective if you’re just putting out fires left and right.
Getting the deep work done is impossible when you’ve got an inbox full of 600 emails that you think need answering.
Let’s just name it: BURNOUT. The high rates of burnout in our industry stem from living in a state of crisis for years on end.
And I’m not arguing with you that your mission is urgent and important. It absolutely is.
But here’s what I’m more concerned about…if you burn out and your staff burns out, who is going to do the incredible work you are doing?
Consider this a big red flag that I’m waving in your face.
Kids are back to school. Fall programming is (or is about to) get up and running. Year end campaigns will require your attention soon. Before you drown in the “urgent and important” tidal wave that’s about to crash down on you, I want you to take a minute and do this exercise with me…right now.
First, take a breath.
If you can go through this exercise with me, you’ll be much better able to handle all the things coming at you in the next few months. Take a deep breath (or maybe at least three? Can you do that?).
Next, get pen and paper.
I’m a kinesthetic learner, and I like operating on pen and paper. There’s something about writing things down (not typing or dictating) that makes me feel like I’m literally pulling thoughts out of my head and calming the chaos inside. (You do you, but I recommend pen and paper.)
Write down the categories of projects and tasks you have on your plate (here are mine: business admin, client support, marketing, family stuff, personal stuff, volunteer work). If there’s only a few tasks per category, you can just divide up a single sheet of paper. If you’re like me and there’s an overwhelming number of tasks, get separate sheets of paper and label each (bonus points if, like me, you do them on different colored paper to keep it all straight…not kidding, I color code everything in my life).
Now pick one category, set a timer for 3-5 minutes, and just think about that category and everything you have to do. When the timer goes off (or a minute has passed and you can’t think of anything else), move on to the next category and repeat.
Now draw the four quadrants on another sheet of paper.
Now take your tasks, and put them into those quadrants.
Let me guess, you know where to put them on the urgent/non-urgent line, but important vs. unimportant…you’re struggling with. But all 600 emails ARE important! (Hint: they aren’t.)
Remember, your goal is to be operating in the non-urgent, important quadrant as much as possible. These are tasks that meaningfully move your work forward, but they’re not urgent, so you’re accomplishing them well ahead of the deadline.
This means you can be thoughtful and proactive. You operate from a place of knowledge (or at least give yourself adequate time to do any necessary research or review). This is where you do your best work with the least amount of stress.
But how do you decide what is important and what isn’t? By having clear goals.
Without goals, the most important thing is whatever you decide it is in that moment. The most important thing is the thing that’s due next. And let’s be real, 9 times out of 10 you’ll wind up answering emails all day (amiright?).
By having clearly defined SMART goals, you can know what is important and what just FEELS important. (There are a lot of things SMART stands for. Here at FIT we use: Specific. Measurable. Actionable. Realistic. Time-bound.)
If you don’t have clear goals, take a minute and figure them out.
I hear you. You don’t have time to come up with a strategic plan with SMART goals right now. Maybe it’s your dream to be able to engage in a big picture, deep dive, strategic plan, but that’s been a dream for five years and you still haven’t gotten there. That’s fine. Maybe it’s just your goals for this week. Ideally, I’d love it if it’s your goals from now until December.
Whatever time frame you can think in right now, for the next 30 minutes, take some time to define your goals for now. (And maybe one of your goals could be to find the time to do the big, deep thinking to make your big goals?)
Have you written down your goals? Excellent! You may now proceed reading...
Now go back to your quadrants and put in the tasks that you weren’t sure were important or not. Decide whether or not they are important based on your goals. Does that feel better and clearer?
Still not sure how to categorize a task? For each task, ask yourself:
Does this task help me achieve (your goal here)?
Does this task improve my ability to achieve (your goal here)?
Does this task build a relationship to achieve (your goal here)?
If you say no to all of these questions, it goes in unimportant.
Here’s an example of something that feels so urgent and important, but you can dump. Your favorite volunteer thinks you should offer a special t-shirt to everyone at your river clean up next month. It feels important, it is your rock star volunteer after all and you want to show how much you care about her. It’s definitely urgent, you’d need to design and order the shirts soon to have them in time. But let’s check. If your goal is to clean a river...
Does this task help you clean the river? Nope. Not even a little bit.
Does this task improve your ability to clean the river? Not really. Maybe it’d make your volunteers easier to spot if they were brightly colored, but some bright neon vests could achieve the same result at half the cost and time.
Does this task build a relationship to clean the river? You might argue yes; it’s a star volunteer, and you don’t want to take them for granted. But really think about it. Is your rock star volunteer going to walk out on you because you didn’t make a t-shirt? Particularly if you explain to her/him that you’ve got a dozen other higher priority tasks (and you can articulate them well if you have SMART goals…). So the answer here is really no.
Now let’s keep things from getting urgent and important.
Let’s start with the not-urgent, not-important quadrant. When I look at this list, I ask myself…
Can I automate it?
Can I delegate it?
Can I delete it?
There are SOOOO many tools out there now to automate repetitive, not important tasks. If it can be automated, do that. (Send a weekly reminder to your volunteers about the weekend’s schedule? You could create a Gmail template with blank slots to fill in so you don’t re-write it each week. You could make a template in your email marketing tool with blank slots, and then tag all your volunteers so that all you have to do is update the blank bits and hit send.)
For anything you can’t automate, can you delegate it? Even if your staff are overwhelmed, could you find a volunteer who can do it? (I worked for an organization that got hundreds of visitors on-site every weekend, so on Monday mornings, we had a volunteer come in and put all emails we got on a sign up sheet into our email marketing tool. He did it while he sipped his morning coffee, and then got on with his day…and I didn’t have to lift a finger.)
If you can’t automate or delegate it, does it really have to get done? Is it something you can just not do? Think long and hard about that. I know a lot of things I would say I can’t delete, but I probably should.
Next, look at the urgent, not-important quadrant. Ask the same questions. Because this is urgent, I recommend automating or delegating these ASAP.
Next, look at the urgent, important quadrant. What I do here is make a plan for tackling everything on it as fast as I possibly can. Let’s get it off the plate.
Now, I have the ability to focus on the urgent, not-important because I’ve cleared my plate.
Keeping things from getting urgent
While you may think you work well under pressure, you very likely don’t. Letting things get urgent is just one way of prioritizing your time, so it feels helpful, but it’s really not the most effective (or efficient) way to work in the long run. It’s what leads to burnout.
Once you have your goals and have figured out what on your task list is important and worth staying on your task list, you need to map out your time.
Here’s how I manage my task list and schedule out my day. I’ve gone through my not-urgent, important tasks and monitored them consistently. I’ve noticed patterns. They can generally sit in categories: marketing, admin work, personal finances, etc. I make sure that I have time for each of these categories each week. I have a meeting on my calendar for about how long they take me each week (if I want to stay on top of it) and I treat that as a meeting with someone else.
Now, I know that doesn’t work for everyone…I’ve learned how to hack my ADHD by becoming a stubborn you-know-what about self-discipline. And honestly, I couldn’t explain how I did that if I tried because I am not totally sure how I do it.
But figure out what works for you to keep on top of the not-urgent, important and keep it from creeping into the urgent. And do it as much as is possible (I get it, urgent stuff happens that’s out of your control…but when we can prevent it, let’s do that.)
Another way I do this is to back time things and give projects better internal deadlines.
Let’s go back to that year-end appeal example from the beginning. You want to send it on December 4. That means you’ll need to print it on November 29, to give yourself a few days in case the printer toner runs out or you use up too many mailing labels. That means your board chair will need to look at it and give you feedback by November 27. Since Thanksgiving is on November 23 and you don’t want to rush your board chair, you should send it to her by November 15. Which means you should have drafted it on November 6 to give you time to write, re-write, and re-work before your hard deadline to get it to your board chair.
A whole month to write an appeal, you might ask? Well, yeah…because you’ve built in time if you’re a day or two late before you have to hammer out any old garbage to send to your board chair.
Doing things well means doing them early. Getting ahead of schedule means (1) having a schedule to begin with and (2) making a realistic plan for your time.
This might feel overwhelming, but once you get in the habit, it actually take a load off of your mind.
At From Scratch Fundraising, we are committed to raising individual revenue while banishing burnout.
Now, I realize that none of this was fundraising advice…maybe I should stay in my lane. BUT in my perspective the number one threat to our fundraising programs is our lead fundraiser burning out and dropping out.
In much of the work we do with our clients, we are looking at ways to systematize and build efficiency into fundraising programs…from the program itself to the day-to-day way the staff implements it. Having a sustainable fundraising program means operating in a way that is sustainable.
If you’ve read this far (a) congratulations and (b) I really do want you to actually do it, so if you didn’t, go back up to the top and do it. You’ve just experienced one of the many ways we coach our clients to raise more revenue while banishing burnout. Would you like to do more with us? Schedule a consultation today and let’s see if we can get you on the path to explosive growth…without the heaping pile of burnout on the side.
