- This will be an occasional series on the skills that you can learn and practice in order to achieve more success. A bit like a lottery ticket, victory isn’t guaranteed, but without it you can’t complain if you don’t win!Successful people have certain habits in common, and these are all learnable skills rather than fixed inherited characteristics. Let’s look at what you can do to make yourself more successful at work:
Organisation of self
Having got control of your thought processes, the next step is to get control of your time – to become organised. Successful people are always organised, there’s no way around it.
This begins with writing everything down. If your head is filled with half finished jobs, promises to remember and other jobs to do, and things to worry about, then your creativity will be blocked. This happens easily because your head can only hold a small number of ideas at one time – between three and seven.
So, write everything down, probably in the form of a master list of jobs to do, a daily list of jobs to do, a diary with all the appointments and follow-up actions, and a notebook (probably based in the Cloud) of all the snippets of information you need to access every now an then. So, now your head is 100% available to create ideas, solve problems, and focus on whatever you are doing and whoever you are with right now.
The result of this will be someone who is reliable. If you are going to be successful with other people it’s vital to always keep your promises; not difficult if you keep everything written down. Keeping promises also includes always being on time (diary and allowing plenty of time for travel) and always delivering work on time (project management, dividing work up into chunks in a planned way, plus diary).
As well as being in control you need to appear in control, which means having a tidy desk. That’s one of the main way that people judge whether you are on top of things, as unreliable a gauge as it might be! (The other way they judge you is whether you arrive on time and deliver on time, as already mentioned).
Finally there is customer care element to how you organise yourself. It’s very important to be easy to get hold of, which means phone always with you, with a good voicemail message, and then always reply to emails and calls. Just doing this will put you ahead of most of the pack.
part 3 will follow soon
