How To Focus Your Personal Genius

Then a couple of months ago I decided to hire a programmer to automate and simplify the process. Total cost - $275, and now my day's worth of effort can now be done in about 30 minutes.

A third example, several years ago I made one of the best purchases of my life, a self-propelled power lawnmower.

Prior to that time it took me about 2-1/2 hours to mow my lawn. And since Wisconsin summers usually average 90 degrees and 85% humidity, and I'm quite allergic to the pollens kicked up in the process of mowing, those weren't my favorite hours of the week.

So why was my new lawnmower a great purchase? First, it gets the job done in about 1 hour. But second, and more important, now my kids could mow the lawn. Before they couldn't, because the lawnmower was just too heavy.

So, that one purchase not only improved efficiency, it enabled me to shift work off of my back and onto someone else's (to say nothing about the missing allergy symptoms). While my kids may not have appreciated it, that was a major win.

One of the people I really admire, John Reese (more on John in a moment) recently pointed out that "time is the only limited resource in marketing."

When you think of this, it really is true. Money and staffing clearly aren't limited - because if you've got a terrific marketing campaign that you can directly tie to incremental profits, you can always justify going over budget to spend more on marketing.

What really is most scarce in marketing is time. There's never enough of it in the marketing world. Marketing is one of those tasks that is truly never done and which expands everlastingly to fill the time allocated to its function. You can always do more research, more analysis, more thinking, more personal contacting of key people, more planning, more writing, and especially more testing.

So one of the most valuable things we can do is to perform a personal analysis on how you are using your time focusing on how you can use your time more effectively (the old sharpen the saw principle - spend your time sharpening your saw rather than working harder with a dull blade).

Some good questions to ask yourself in that analysis include:

1. How could you use your resources at hand to more efficiently do your job (the sailing canoe example)?
Some PR examples may include
- Learning how to better use technology to distribute press releases,
- Improving your organization system (perhaps by using a computerized system like ACT) to better sort your media contacts database
- Improving your tickler file system to better build key media and industry contacts
- Better prioritizing your time so that you focus first on those items that will deliver the greatest return
- Systematize the process you use to identify new hooks, leads and news stories within your organization to ensure that you have a constant stream of great new ideas to promote.

2. How can you cut the time it takes to do key tasks so that you are able to focus on other projects (the programming example)?
Some examples include:
- Having someone create a custom program to automate some of your most time-consuming tasks like report development, competitive tracking, scheduling, tracking, testing, etc.
Note that this process generates the exact same result with less time spent in creating that result.
- Analyze which of your tasks truly add value, and cut those that add the least. Its amazing to me how many people get a stack of printed reports from IT every day / week / month that never gets opened. Could those reports get eliminated, saving time and money?
Note, this process asks which results are most desired and focuses the company's resources against them, at the expense of those which are of lowest value.
- Learn to say no to those things which have limited potential to generate incremental sales, even if they're a favorite of the CEO or other key player, or worse yet, even if your company has done it that way for years!

3. How can you shift time-sucking tasks from genius employees onto others (the lawn mowing example)?
Don't take this wrong - because almost every employee has skills, possibly genius skills in certain areas. But in every company there are key players who possess genius skills which helped make the company what it is today. Unfortunately, this genius is usually rewarded with additional responsibility, which severely cuts into the time and energy available for those people to do their genius work.

Think about it - our very system of rewards in business operates backwards - we take our company's genius and dumb it down by insisting that the only way we can promote and pay more is for an individual to do more stuff that's outside the area of their genius. What a waste!

You're probably in this camp. You're a genius. But I bet that your daily responsibilities leave you only a few minutes per week to actually do what you're so good at doing.

And, face it, your company is suffering as a result.

When this is the case, you've got to shift the non-genius stuff onto someone else. That someone can be another employee, someone from outside your company, or a computer. It is vital that you, as a product creation genius, a key customer relationship genius, a people motivation genius, or a big picture thinking genius, stop mowing the lawn!

This is a huge piece of advice! Whatever "the lawn" is in your particular job, get rid of it. Someone else can do it, even if it is something that's really important. Shift responsibilities, hire someone else to do that other work, pave the stupid lawn over with green painted cement if you have to, but find a way to allow yourself and your company's other geniuses to spend at least 4 hours of every single day, doing genius stuff.

Please note: if you truly heard what I just said, 6 months from now, this concept has the potential to increase your bottom line by 25%.

It's that important.

So, now that you have this idea seeded in your mind, what are you going to do about it?

One of the things that we do is to work with companies and individuals who want to improve their results. We do this through consulting and coaching. If you're interested in substantially increasing your company and personal results, and you recognize that though the results will be significant, this process is not going to be cheap and is going to take some major changes within your company and personal life, call me (Don Crowther) and let's talk. You can reach me between 10 and 5 Central time at 262-639-2270.

Plus, here are some resources to help you better focus your energies against your public relations genius areas and to help you do your PR job more efficiently:

Press Release Templates: 10 Templates to Simplify Creation of Incredible Press Releases (decreasing the time required to create great releases)

How To Hire The Perfect Publicist (Shifting responsibilities onto someone else)

103 Sizzling Story Ideas From July Through December (Improving the process of generating new story ideas)

and its companion 116 "WOW!" Story Ideas From January Through June

Tags: Time Management