Have you heard the old saying, “When you’re up to your neck in alligators, it’s hard to remember your purpose was to drain the swamp.”? As leaders we’re always at least up to our knees in alligators, so before we start each day, we better get out the drawings for the plan to drain the swamp. We can call it casting vision, or focusing on our mission, but whatever we call it knowing what we’re doing and why we’re doing it is crucial to accomplishing anything worthwhile over time. If we don’t remember we came to drain the swamp, we’ll eventually occupy all our time with fighting alligators.
Yes, we must fight the alligators, or at least redirect the alligators to a location where they won’t be able to destroy us before we get the swamp drained, but if all we do is fight alligators, we never drain the swamp and the alligators habitat remains conducive for their growth and multiplication. The challenge is a live alligator seems so much more urgent that a rising swamp–in the moment. We’ve all experienced the tyranny of the urgent. We know that many times we tackle the urgent whether it’s important or not, while leaving the important but not urgent matters of life undone. We all know the long-term impact of doing so, and yet the urgent is so…urgent.
How do we keep draining the swamp the focus of our pursuit with everything life throws at us? I already mentioned it in passing: we start the day by looking at the plans and strategy for draining the swamp. Last week, I started again, again, at making certain I start my day with planning with looking at the plans and strategy for draining the swamp. I still faced some alligators, but when I did, I realized the ones I needed to let swim by and the ones that were getting in the way of draining the swamp. I also passed a couple of them on to others–I delegated. Again, we know what we need to do, at least if we’re leaders we know what we need to do. We need to remind ourselves to keep doing it. So often even when we know that failing to plan is planning to fail, we keep looking for some silver bullet that will kill the alligators and help drain the swamp with one shot.
There is no silver bullet.
Now that we have that out of the way, we can get back to the seemingly mundane task of looking at the plans for draining the swamp, and the reasons the swamp needs draining in the first place. After all, even draining the swamp may not be the most important task we face, so we better make sure it is. After all, having an effective plan to accomplish something we ought not to be pursuing in the first place isn’t helpful either. As I sat down to review my plans for draining the swamp last week, I realized that part of the process must be maintaining some daily practices I had been letting slide: prayer, exercise, studying Spanish, and journaling to name a few. Your daily practices may be different, but when I include those four into my morning routine I find that my head clears and I am able to attend to the day’s work much more effectively.
After that I need to look at the plans and select a few key actions that are going to contribute to it, not just a handful of items I can put on my to do list, and feel good about when I check them off as being done. While, I may have a few items I must do today either personally or in my work, those are not the key action items that will move me toward draining the swamp. As I work on the few key items and check them off, I know my plan is moving closer to being accomplished. As I say, we all know this, but taking the time to put it in print has been helpful to me. I hope it is also helpful to you.
Have you looked at the plans yet today? Have you established those few items that will make the biggest difference to accomplishing it? Have you determined which alligators you’re going to fight today, and which ones you’re either going to let lie, or pass on to someone else? How we answer these questions will determine whether the end of the day will find us closer to a drained swamp, or just tired.
Here’s to leading better by taking the time to look at the plans–today!