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Moving Relationships Forward: Make Headway on the Most Important Things, with Todd Davis, Chief People Officer, FranklinCovey and Author, Get Better
Pinball Syndrome
We’re all familiar with the old pinball games in arcades, and they have the bells and buzzers and whistles. You have these flippers on the side and you pull this plunger back, and a ball goes hurling into the machine, and the goal is to try to keep it bouncing and ricocheting off things as long as possible. In the end, gravity wins out and the ball goes down the hole, and you can turn around and pull the plunger back. It’s fun because it’s a game. It’s stimulus. It gives us this adrenaline rush the longer we can keep it going.
I have found at work that we sometimes get caught in what is called, or what I’m calling, the pinball syndrome, where we finish at the end of the day or end of the week and we’re exhausted. We’ve been running around, we’re busy and feeling important and in all these meetings and answering all these calls and emails. And yet, when we look back we ask, what of real value has been accomplished? What are the important things that I’ve really moved forward on? This pinball syndrome, if we’re not careful, if we don’t step back and see where we’re spending our time, we’ve confused urgency with importance. Urgencies are those things that act on us, like a ringing phone, like an email that beeps when it comes in, or a text or whatever. Important things are those things that we act on, things that we plan around.
I had a great manager come to me, and one of her people wanted to leave her department. It was because she didn’t have time to meet with him. She said to me, “Todd, you can see how busy I am. I’d love to meet with him everyday.” I said, “Well, what happens if you lose him?” She said, “Oh, I can’t lose him, he’s a star performer?” I said, “Well, what’s really important here?”
Get unstuck
No one comes to me and says, “Todd, I’m stuck in the pinball syndrome”, because they wouldn’t even know to say that. But they will say, “I’m really frustrated with the results I’m not getting”, or, “I’m really frustrated that so and so is being promoted and I’m not.” And if we look back on it and it ties to their results, what I will ask them to do–and I’ve done this many times for myself, too, so I’m learning right along with them–is print out however they track their week. Print out their calendar from last week. Print out their task list or whatever methodology they use. Have a tracking system from your last week, because it’s reflection time, to say, “Where am I spending my time?”
Then what I have them do is–they’ve got this list formulated–is go through and circle or underline those things that are urgent. And then have another signifier or mark for those things that are important. If something is both, and many things are important and urgent, then go ahead and classify them as important as well. Through this activity, I’ve yet to find somebody who doesn’t identify at least a few things, if not several, that are urgent but not important, or certainly less important. Doing that simple activity for the week that’s already happened allows you to go into the next week with some careful planning, saying, “You know what, I’m going to eliminate, or at least postpone, some of these urgent things that tend to be part of my week.
People who master this, or start to master this, and stay out of the pinball syndrome, are those people who, whatever their planning method is, usually at the beginning of the week, they map out what are the most important things they want to get accomplished this week. And they block out sacred time for those things. If you want to think of it this way, make an appointment with yourself. But just as you wouldn’t move an important appointment with someone who’s flying in from around the world to meet with you, don’t move that appointment. Now, don’t be a jerk. Don’t be stubborn. But hold those things in your list of priorities as important as you would with somebody very important, because you’re important. Block out that time, and maybe it’s only two times a week, where you’re going to really drill down, make some movement, make some headway on the most important things, versus letting the urgencies take over and the pinball syndrome be the winner at the end of the day.