Issue #76 This weakness keeps you stuck
You have a serious business weakness.
I am 100% sure that this is a fact.
It will cause you to do dumb things, waste time, and work much harder than you need to.
And, as sure as I am that you have this weakness, I also know how you can overcome it.
More on that in a second.
First, some Updates:
♟️ Planning is this week. Here is our two-day Schedule:
- Thursday morning: intro to gameplan and how we work for first-timers.
- Thursday afternoon: talks on AI, Linkedin, and how to plan.
- Thursday night: dinner!
- Friday all day: strategic planning.
💬 Ooops. Yeah, I might have made that mistake. So, to avoid it, I came up with the five golden rules of sticky communication and messaging that doesn’t suck. Read more here.
📣 Podcast: Do you know where your security holes are? This guy does. Listen here.
You suffer from the availability heuristic.
I know this because you are human.
(Unless you are a large language model AI, in which case the problem is worse.)
Here’s what happens: humans are much better at recalling information that is stored in short-term memory than they are at remembering stuff from the past.
We base our thinking on whatever is in our minds. (Shouldn’t be much of a surprise if you really think about it).
So, we are much more likely to favor recent information over less-current information.
This leads to the recency effect: or basing our actions on the most recent information we find.
Why the recency effect matters:
When you start working, you are more likely to think that whatever comes up now is more important than anything else.
The email that arrived, the call, the customer complaint, and the answer to who killed the prick in Bad Sisters are all current issues. But they aren’t necessarily important.
(Side note: this is a valuable marketing observation too. But we’ll talk about that another time.)
All else equal, you are most likely to spend your limited time and resources on emails, calls, and complaints. When those get so overwhelming, you can’t take it anymore, your brain runs away, and that Bad Sister’s question becomes unignorable.
Worse: this serves you well as an employee.
But, working this way, succumbing to busyness, and focusing on what’s most recent will keep you working in a job rather than building a business.
So what’s the way out?
Make a plan.
It’s planning that gives us a long-term view and allows us to break free of the availability heuristic. A plan gives you goals, objectives, and metrics that allow you to put the day-to-day into perspective.
A plan allows you to build a business rather than a job.
This week for us, is all about planning.
So whether you are joining us in person or playing from home, define 3-4 objectives, break them down into key results, and decide what you will do over the next 14 weeks to build a business, not a job.
Ready to get started?
- Learn how to implement the horizon planning model.
- Review the past 2 horizons to identify what you need to focus on.
- Also, try the opportunity maturity assessment to figure out what part of the machine needs the most work.
- Identify some OKRs.
Use this to create a plan that breaks you free of the availability heuristic and allows you to build a business, not a job.
Yours in planning,
Jeff
🙋🏽Have Business Questions?
Ask them here: register a question, we’ll do our best to find an answer, and we’ll talk about these questions on May 12… at 11AM.
The meeting link (and reminders) will go out to Insiders in a separate email.
