Welcome to the Tendo 4D for maximum focus model.
For most business owners and most employees in business, time is the single biggest commodity that we own. It’s the one thing that we struggle to find more of.
I hear countless business owners getting to the end of the day to say they’ve been busy, but not productive. And it’s down to lack of focus and lack of prioritisation on what they should and could be doing.
Human nature tells us that we are programmed to get rid of as many tasks throughout the day as possible. The problem with that is that often, we spend our time and effort and focus on the wrong tasks. We’re trying very, very hard to get that task list down. Instead, what we should be doing is focusing on the tasks that are going to deliver the maximum benefit to us and our organisations.
The Tendo 4D model
So, we’ve developed the Tendo 4D model. This allows you to focus your efforts and prioritise your workload. This will result in helping you to become super, super focused, and get better results out of your working day.
Now, the model is really, really simple. What the model does is it enables you to prioritise what’s important and what’s urgent into one of four boxes. This that allows you, if you focus on doing this every single day, to get that focus that you need.
If a task is high priority and highly urgent, that needs to go in the “just do it” box. This is the box that says, ‘this is what I need to focus my time, effort and energy on today’. If a particular task is important for you to do but isn’t urgent, a VAT return, for example. Traditionally, you would have done that task to get it out of the way. What this model allows you to do is to say ‘that is important, but it’s not urgent right now’. So what you can now do is diarise it. Schedule time in your diary at a later date when it is important and urgent, and do it then.
There are tasks that are very, very urgent, but they’re not important to you. So what you should do with those tasks is you should look to delegate those. Delegate those to a member of your team or an outsourced resource, but delegate them to somebody that can deal with that urgency. This ensures you do not take away the importance, but allows you to put your time to the tasks that are important to you.
And last but not least, if a task is neither urgent nor important, delete it, delay it, stick it in the defer box, but just don’t worry about it right now.
My recommendation
So my recommendation and what works for me, is to take five minutes at the start of every single day before you turn the computer on, before you turn your social media on, make yourself a cup of tea, sit down at your desk, get a new piece, a new day, fill the date in and then identify all of those tasks that you’ve accumulated from the day before from post it notes, emails, text messages, wherever they may be and put them into one of these four boxes.
And by focusing only on those tasks that are in the urgent and important area on this model, you’re going to get the focus you need and deliver the results you need in your business. Don’t get distracted. Thank you very much.
Related resources
- Why happy staff means happy clients
- Which apps should I be using in my business?
- Where are you spending your valuable time?
Are you struggling to focus on high value and money generating activities because you are dealing with the other ‘stuff’ that enters your inbox or lands on your desk? If so, it’s time to take action.
Access our tool here to get started: tendo-uk.com/focus
