Anything That is Not Managed Will Deteriorate

When you look at a typical business, I do not care if it is a McDonald’s down the street from where you live, you are going to see an incredible number of procedures and things going on that are necessary to keep the business running.  Take a McDonald’s, for example:

Each day the restaurant will open at a certain time and people will get there before opening to make sure that the coffee is made, the ovens and grills are heated, the lights are turned on and other procedures are followed.  The restaurant will have been cleaned top to bottom the night before.  Outside, the parking lot will have been maintained a certain way.  The lines will have been painted and repainted according to a schedule.  The drive through will have the most recent menu items on it.  There will be a list of shift responsibilities posted.  The bathrooms will have been scheduled to be cleaned a certain number of times throughout the day.  The oil that the hash browns and the French fries are made in will have been changed according to a rigid schedule.  Not only will the employees of this individual restaurant be responsible for all of these tasks, and the manager, but there will be numerous other people who will be charged with all of this as well.  There are regional and national managers who inspect to make sure that all of this is functioning exactly as it should.  The books and accounting of the restaurant will all be required to be done in a certain manner and each year the taxes will also be done in a certain way.  The food deliveries that occur throughout the day will also be from only approved suppliers who also may be forced to follow certain processes and procedures.  In addition, the company will constantly keep its ear to the ground and do studies to see what sorts of foods and other services the public wants.  This “market research” will then be used to develop new products that the franchisees will sell.

From top to bottom, a McDonald’s is being managed by a myriad of processes and procedures to insure it remains a smooth running operation.  This will insure that the McDonald’s, wherever it is, offer a consistent product to the public.  Moreover, this will also insure that the McDonald’s succeed wherever it is.  Very few McDonald’s go out of business due to poor sales.  Most of them go out of business due to processes and procedures not being rigidly followed.

One of the greatest secrets of your own life and business is this: Anything that is not managed will deteriorate.

It is as simple as that.  If a business is not managed very closely it will likely go out of business, or suffer abysmal sales.  McDonalds typically succeed wherever they are more for the closeness of how they are managed than anything else.  The most important thing that can happen with a business is to manage it.  The most important thing you can do with your life is to manage it as well.

Let me tell you a little bit about managing a life.  You need to manage your own life just like a business.  The closer you manage your life the better you will ultimately do in your life and the more success you will have.  You will go through ups and downs but you will almost certainly consistently remain on track and improve.  Better managing of your life is essential for your success.

The most successful people out there in every realm of life know where they are going.  When you start managing yourself you start setting goals about exactly where you are going.  Most of the battle of managing yourself is simply setting a goal of where you want to go.  When you know where you want to go you need to write it down and then you need to remind yourself of this again and again and create a procedure for doing this.  You need to manage your life.

I have developed over the past several years a very simple method of managing myself and my goals.  Once a year I sit down and over the space of a few days I concentrate on making several commitments for what I want to achieve over the next year.  I simply write down what I call my “Top 1 Year Results”  and list them out on a sheet of paper.   Each year I list no more than 10 to 15 of these goals.  Then I do the same thing at the beginning of each month on a separate sheet of paper.  Then I do the same thing on the beginning of each week on a separate sheet of paper.

YEARLY GOALS-Major goals to achieve throughout the year.  These are big goals that could involve things like making sure I go out to eat with my wife alone at least once a week, starting a new business, creating a new business, paying something off.  I allow myself each January to write down goals which are attainable but seem far off.

For example, a yearly goal of yours might be to increase your salary by 50% and move to a warmer part of the United States.  This is something you can do but you need to constantly remind yourself of it.  Writing this down is going to make you accountable and bring you closer to this goal.

MONTHLY GOALS-These monthly goals are almost always goals which bring me one step closer to achieving my yearly goals.  They are related and are projects and goals that allow me to get closer and closer to these yearly goals.

If your yearly goal is to increase your salary by 50% and move to a warmer part of the United States, the smartest thing you can do is to schedule a goal to bring you closer to this at the beginning of the month.  A goal along this direction could be, for example, to apply to 1 job per day per month–or a total of 30 jobs throughout the whole month. This monthly goal is going to bring you one step closer to what you are seeking to do.

WEEKLY GOALS-These are goals that I need to accomplish during the week to take me closer to my monthly goals and my yearly goals.

If you are looking to increase your salary by 50% and move to a warmer climate, your weekly goal may be to apply to 7 jobs this week, get your resume done and make 7 phone calls to companies in your preferred area of the United States to see if they received your resume the week before.

This is the method I follow in my own career and it is very simple.  Once a year I sit down and write out my annual goals.  Then, once a week I sit down and review my goals from the week before, my monthly goals and my annual goals.  I then set goals for the following week based on what I achieved in the previous week.  Each week I make myself aware of how I am doing in terms of my goals and I set my goals for the previous week based on how I did in the last week.

The point about this method of setting goals is that it works.  If you are able to make just a 1% improvement each week the improvement you have made after 1 year is absolutely phenomenal.  The improvement that is made under this system is remarkable and you will watch your life and career continually improve as long as you make sure that you are accountable for what is going on.  What this simple system forces you to do is manage yourself.  You need to continually be managing yourself because if you do not manage yourself someone else will.

Most people coast through life and their careers not knowing what is going to come next. The wonderful thing is that you can really have practically anything you want out of life as long as you write it down and take action on it and then follow through.  The most important aspect of your goal setting activity is following though.  That means reviewing your goals at least once a week and seeing exactly how you are doing.  The more closely you are reviewing your goals to see how you are doing the better off you are going to be.  Continually watching and readjusting and setting micro goals to take you to where you are going are effective.

The wonderful thing about this sort of goal setting activity and self management is that it works.  Every week at the beginning of each year when I look at what I need to achieve I cringe. I feel like it will never be possible.  But what ends up happening when you are continually and consistently reviewing your goals is that you make things happen. You figure out a way during the week to get you closer to your goals.  You see opportunities where you would normally see nothing.  You take advantage of so many things that normally would simply pass you by.  You see people around you who have information that could get you closer to your goal and you speak with them.

Anything you focus on you will get better at.  Most people spend their time focusing on the wrong things.  You need to remain focused on your goals.  Repetition is the mother of skill.  When you set goals for yourself it is like setting a thermometer.  If you check in each week and you are looking to be at 75 degrees and you are, instead, at 45 degrees then you are going to take action and do whatever you can to raise the temperature.  You will find a way.  This is how it is with goal setting and creating goals for your life.  You are setting a temperature at which you want to be operating at and you are making sure that you are there.  No matter what you have done with your life in the past, when you set goals for yourself and manage your life you are insuring that the past never is the same as the future.

The best thing about self management is that it gives you the power of momentum.  The best thing you can do is get the power of momentum working for you.  This momentum will keep you going forward and insure that you are moving clearly towards exactly where you want to go and be.

You need to manage yourself. The best businesses are well managed and so are the best people.