The One Thing You Need to Do Every Week

Course Correcting With The Weekly Review

The people who get nothing done often work a great deal harder.

Effective executives do not race. They set an easy pace but keep going steadily. Finally, the effective executive does one thing at a time.

This is a point we have to continually remind ourselves of because the excitement of doing many things at once often beats the logic of doing one thing at a time.

For example, last year, we were growing the readership of this newsletter nicely, and then to speed things up, we tried doing many things at once.

Nothing worked. Not even what was working. Since then, our readership has declined.

We got speedy and lost focus.

The 1-60 rule says that a 1 degree error in heading will cause a plane to miss its target by 1 mile for every 60 miles flown.

A method that helps us course correct is called the weekly review.

At the end of each week, we ask ourselves these questions:

• Did we achieve the top three things we wanted to accomplish this week?

• What moved the needle for us this week?

• Did we miss any opportunities this week by not doing our most important tasks? And what was the cost of missing these?

​Using this Google form.

The point of these questions is to help us see the cost of being busy but not effective, i.e. trying to do too much at once.

When you see your busyness, cost you the opportunity to make a $10,000 sale or cause another week of poor marketing results because you were doing things that someone else could have done. You want to change your approach quickly.

Notes:

What Peter touches on above likely applies to all areas of life, not just when conducting commerce.

The more energy we put into something, the more likely we will do it well.

It's like trying to learn one instrument versus three at once. In most cases, the person who learns one at a time will beat the person trying to learn all at once.

Expectation Setting

Scenario analysis is about as fun as cleaning windows.

Apart from your numbers-loving corporate CFO or coffee-drunk investment banker, virtually no one at any level of business does them.

But, like a clean window, they give you a much clearer view because they mentally prepare you for situations that might not come to be and unexpected ones that do.

We've noticed many business owners and certain colleagues in those businesses tend to set expectations and make decisions based on overly optimistic future predictions.

As entrepreneurs, we are default optimistic; why else would we be willing to engage in such risky activities. But that optimism has a cost. It seduces us, especially those shorter in the tooth, into risqué situations that must be avoided.

Even those who are great decision-makers become unstuck when gazing into overly rosy crystal balls. Because a perfect decision can be perfectly wrong when the data set it's based on is false.

Like hiring someone, it turns out you can't afford, only to cut their wages in half to make payroll - witnessed by us, caused by us.

Or overspending in your personal life, forcing you to pull money from your business that it doesn't have - witnessed by us, fought by us.

The good news is we don't need to complete complex scenario analysis to avoid this foolishness and tame the entrepreneur's natural instincts. Instead, a simple buffer does the trick.

Cut projections of good in your business by 25% and increase projections of bad in your business by 25%.

Think you'll do $100k in revenue - instead, project with $75k.

Think your wage spend will be $10k instead budget for $12.5k.

Notes:

Not only does this stop us from spending money we don't have, but it forces us to be more creative with the money we do and or think we will have.

Reserve banks worldwide are currently using this tool (expectation setting) to fight inflation more effectively than they can with actual interest rates.

Most Of What We Do Is Useless

We routinely play this little game in our business where we find something that looks like it's meant to be and get rid of it to see what happens.

Like an Ad, a chart of accounts, a KPI, a product, a seat at our office, a process, or even a staff member (with time off).

It's surprising how often getting rid of it does nothing.

Last year kinda out of the blue, we killed all paid advertising in our business. Not much happened. Then we killed all marketing activities altogether. And still, not much happened.

Our marketer even said this in response to a yearly review question.

"That turning off our ads resulted in so little difference to lead numbers."

How much effort we waste is anyone's guess, but it's definitely more than what we expect.

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