Creating a POP culture
Imagine if every single person in your organization, team or family were a Multiplier.
What if each person on the team was doing exactly his or her next most Significant thing at precisely the best time?
What if you reduced the amount of time being spent on insignificant activities?
What if you completely got rid of everything that didn’t need to be done in the first place?
What if you used a system like Infusionsoft that automated everything that was happening over and over again?
What if every task was delegated to the perfect person with just the precise skill set and the appropriate decision-making ability to handle the challenge at hand?
What if your entire team had the perfect mix of patience and action?
What would that look like for you? Can you even imagine how big, awesome, fun and profitable that would be? What kind of impact on the world that would be?
You would truly be multiplying.
That would be what we call a Procrastinate on Purpose culture—or a POP culture for short.
How do you do that? Well, pretty simple, really.
First, you take all the principles of this book that we have gone through and you apply them to your own life. You lead by example and you show people by experimenting with the application of what we hope you’ve learned thus far.
Then, you teach these principles to everyone in your organization.
As a review, an individual Multiplier looks like this:
You teach your team about the distinctions between:
。One-dimensional thinking: “Managing your time” by doing things fast and efficiently in order to try to squeeze more into whatever time you have available. This is like running.
。Two-dimensional thinking: “Prioritizing your time” by the Urgent and Important grid to borrow time from one area of your life to focus instead on another. It’s the skill of putting one thing in front of the others. This is like juggling.
。Three-dimensional thinking: “Multiplying your time” by adding in the calculation of Significance. And to specifically give yourself the emotional permission to spend time on those things today that will create more time tomorrow. This is like planting seeds.
Next, you teach everyone how to process all of their incoming “stuff” by using the Focus Funnel to help decide how to process each task that comes their way. Make sure they know that the ultimate litmus test is to, whenever possible, spend time on things today that create more time tomorrow.
You will of course need to teach them how to access the five Permissions, since choosing how to spend your time is no longer about calendars and checklists, tasks and To Do lists because of time management isn’t just logical—it’s emotional.
And you are going to want your leaders to understand all of the different types of costs we’ve discussed:
- Actual cost (the five-dollar coffee)
- Opportunity cost (what you’re not able to buy as a result of spending five dollars on the coffee)
- Hidden cost (the potential forty-five dollars in interest lost by choosing to spend that five dollars rather than invest it)
- Money value of time, or M.V.O.T., cost (the hourly rate of a person’s time spent on any activity)
- Unnecessary change cost (the cost of rework)
- Intermittent change cost (the cost of time lost as the result of changing back and forth unnecessarily between multiple activities)
- Invisible cost (a combination of real costs and M.V.O.T. costs that simply go unmeasured and unmonitored in an organization)
You will also want to teach your leaders that the greatest potential for cost savings in the organization may not be by reducing financial expenses but that it very well likely could be by reducing time expenditures.
In other words, you are going to set up your entire corporate structure in a way that works to:
。Eliminate unnecessary initiatives, meaningless activity, useless bureaucracy, the wrong people, unproductive meetings and obstacles that are holding your team back.
。Automate regimented tasks, necessary but monotonous work and mechanisms that help reduce “think time” on tasks that are noncreative.
。Delegate work and decision-making authority to the specialized talent you have on your team. As my friend and Multiplier Steve Savage says, “Drive decision making downward.” Purposely enable the vast majority of decisions to be heavily influenced and, hopefully, made by the people who are closest to the front lines.
。Procrastinate on projects that aren’t yet at the “right time” for your organization or anything you aren’t sure is critical to the future direction of the team.
。Concentrate on the next most Significant step for yourself and your organization. Try to create a culture where every task and decision finds the person who is perfectly appropriate for the condition.
All throughout the entire organization, you are going to promote and reinforce the thinking that everyone make the Significance calculation. You will also encourage them to do the things today that create more time and results tomorrow. If you give them the permission to do that, you will be astounded to find that they have incredible ideas about exactly what needs to be done.
At the same time, work to incorporate a Take the Stairs mindset of getting people excited about doing the things they know they should be doing even when they don’t feel like doing them. Champion the reduction of multitasking and intermittent change cost through the power of focus and encouraging people to Concentrate.
Of course it will be rather challenging to ensure that all of this happens. While you are doing all of that for the organization, you also have to keep up with your own life and work. We hope you’ll be using all that you’ve learned to do your best at appropriately finding the patience to wait and the discipline to act.
It may seem daunting to transform an entire culture, but it’s worth it. There is nothing more exciting than being in a culture where everyone is multiplying their time and the value of the organization by spending time on things today that create more time and results tomorrow.
You might think that it’s “easier said than done”—and that is for sure—but if you are working to transform a culture, you have one asset that you should never underestimate: people.
Production multiplies most powerfully through people because any one person whom you take an interest in can be the next great Multiplier. Anything that I’ve done or contributed to anyone has been the direct result of having been invested in by so many others. I’d bet the same is true for you.
The call for each of us, then, should be to choose wisely some people whom we can invest in, knowing that they will be the Seed Planters of the future. And our reward is seeing how the things that we have shared with them end up impacting their lives in a positive way. There isn’t much that is more Significant than that. As mega-Multiplier and Southwestern legend Spencer Hays always says, “You can’t build a business; you build people and people build the business.”
What is the one thing that all the items in this list have in common?
Simple. Every single one of them is not a spending of time; they are an investing of time. Which is ultimately the core of what we’ve been talking about and gives us cause to make a slightly modified final statement of the message of this entire book:
Multiply your time by giving yourself the emotional permission to invest time into things today that will create more time and results for tomorrow.
* Source: Procrastinate on Purpose by Rory Vaden