Managing Leadership^®

Years ago, in a popular ad-lib comedy skit, Mel Brooks played a 2000 year old man being interviewed by Carl Reiner. Reiner asked if the old man had ever had a medical problem in all those years. Yes, Brooks recalled, once he had been run over by 6 men fleeing a lion:

They just ran me over. And the worst part of it was: I didn’t have insurance, they didn’t have insurance. So, what do you do? You just lay there ’till you get better.”

How many of us haven’t felt run over, at times, by all the issues on our agenda. This is a persistent, and really quite serious problem, that besets everyone in an organization, throughout the chain of command.

Indeed, some consultants make a pretty good living teaching time-management techniques to everyone across that spectrum. Specialized agenda programs - whether paper or electric - help us categorize, prioritize, and organize all our tasks so we don’t lose track of any of them. We know exactly what our deadlines are, our progress, and the requirements for advancing the cause.

What could be better? It’s all tied up nicely in a neat little package. All we have to do is open up our agenda program and start at the top where we see - oops! More tasks seem to have piled in since we were last there. Well, no problem: we’ll just categorize, prioritize, organize and integrate them into our list. Then everything will be fine again.

Except that we spend time organizing that we should be spending doing. And that happens because we keep getting flattened by yet more fleeing people and tasks coming at us. And they won’t wait for you to get better organized before running you over again.

But doesn’t it seem like there’s another question begging to be asked here, both in the the story and in our struggle with our agenda?

There is. And if we want to keep the joke from being on us, we’ll ask it.

We’ll talk more about that, tomorrow. See you then!

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You may wish to see all the posts in this series:

1. Running away from our problems
2. Nickels . . .
3. . . . and dimes
4. The triage of life
5. The golden tasking

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Today’s tip: Please take a moment to view this piece by Jessica Stillman at BNET, reporting the results of a survey indicating that UK managers are feeling overworked and overstressed. It’s a pretty safe bet that, as the author speculates, managers elsewhere would agree. Check the item to see if you are (or are not) among those who do.

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