Sales Savvy

For most professionals, it is not unusual to come into your day with one set of priorities and have five more things heaped onto the list by Noon. For example, a business owner may find that their role morphs into accountant, bill collector, errand boy (or girl), customer service rep, janitor, office manager, light bulb changer, sales person, marketer, etc. That’s a lot of hats to wear and behind that are a lot of tasks to handle. As long as you’re not handing your customer the toilet plunger instead of their bill, it might be considered a successful day! We’ve all had them whether we work for ourselves or someone else. Task overload. When the tasks overcome the priorities of the day, we have “task saturation”.

Author Jim Murphy writes about task saturation and specifically how fighter pilots handle it. Those same steps can be applied to business to effectively combat task saturation. In his seminar and book, he tells the story of a commercial crew that was in the process of landing when they discovered that the landing gear switch was on the fritz. As the pilots focused on the mechanics of the switch, no one realized that the auto pilot was accidentally shut off. And no one thought to ask Traffic Control to confirm that the landing gear was down. They were so caught up in the task that they didn’t realize the plane had descended to 1000 feet and the plane crashed. Unfortunately, task saturation can have deadly consequences on your business. (Note: I’m going by memory on the story, but the gist remains the same)

Task saturation decreases performance, accuracy, and productivity. I think about task saturation every time I open my email. I have this compulsion to make sure that I clean out my inbox every day—deleting what doesn’t need to be read, reading what does, responding, filing, etc. It’s the equivalent of having a tidy house, in my mind, and I like a tidy house.  Even though I establish email rules with my team so I can best manage email, the fact remains that email can be a HUGE distraction, not an enhancement to your day. Email is just one example, and probably the most benign because there are many, many more…

When there is so much to do and few people to do it, task saturation can become the culture. Help your staff understand what is expected of them as it relates to your business priorities. And be careful not to contradict that. This can happen if you give someone a long list of tasks that are helpful to you but not necessary to the business or their job. A long list of unnecessary tasks can give people a GREAT feeling of accomplishment. But if it doesn’t enhance the business or your staff, it might reinforce the wrong behaviors.

You might call it simple time management, but it is more complex than that. Let’s face it, when you are busy and/or you are “all things to everyone”, the pressure mounts to keep the mechanics of the business running smoothly. Everyone has a role in this. It is easy to be distracted, unknowingly. Sometimes it is easier to avoid the work at hand. The fact is that you may be very busy, but it might not be activity that ultimately supports your business goals.

In the second part of the series, we will talk about how task saturation creeps up on you and how to control it.