Business hygiene and habits

From The Eisenhower Decision Matrix: How to Distinguish Between Urgent and Important Tasks and Make Real Progress in Your Life by Brett and Kate McKay.

A very useful framework and prism for viewing an issue. Reading their essay made me look at past actions with new terms. As an executive, whenever I was tasked with “fixing” a business unit, my immediate focus in the first two months was 1) Do I have the right people in the right roles for the outcomes that need to be achieved and 2) What is the state of the business hygiene. The first is a set of relatively obvious (though difficult to diagnose and treat) issues. The second was to me always the low hanging fruit.

What constitutes business hygiene? It is the degree to which routine business functions are habitualized.

• Are clients being billed on a regularly scheduled basis?
• Are outstanding balances being collected?
• Are there uncollectible amounts sitting on the books that should be written off?
• Are we providing scheduled updates on project status to clients?
• Are we providing routine personnel reviews?
• Are we executing and tracking the actions agreed in each executive meeting?
• Are we conducting routine project quality reviews?
• Do all our projects have a contract?
• Is everybody accurately reporting their time and expenses in a timely fashion?
• Are employees being promptly reimbursed?
• Etc.

It is astonishing how often these basic blocking-and-tackling functions can degrade over time without anyone noticing. The consequence is that what should be routine, habitual actions to which you pay no thought, begins to be a process for generating urgent issues that distract you from dealing with the important things. So whenever I took up responsibility for a new business unit, that was the first month of activities; doing a health check on the business hygiene and putting actions in place to fix any outstanding maladies. Not dealing with the basics first often meant that months two, three and four of the turnaround would go much more slowly because too much time was being spent putting out unnecessary fires arising from bad habits/poor business hygiene.

This matrix suggests a very useful self-audit - where am I actually investing my time and am I getting the return I expect from that investment? Most likely past circumstances and unconsciously evolved habits are driving more of your time into unproductive quadrants than is desirable and forming new and different habits can address that misallocation of your most precious resource, time.