Breaking the Cycle of Short Term Decision Making
Be More Productive by Breaking the Habit of Short-Term Decision Making
The internet is full of productivity and efficiency hacks and habits for small business owners, but there’s one glaring bad habit that I think doesn’t get nearly enough attention — even though it can keep you stuck and ruin your productivity and efficiency. One of the worst habits business owners can fall into when it comes to productivity is getting stuck in the cycle of short-term thinking versus long-term thinking in decision-making. With short-term thinking, you’re focused on instant gratification, or only looking at what the immediate consequences of a decision or action might be. With long-term thinking, you’re considering how your decisions will play out in both the short and long term. Sometimes short-term decisions seem like a no-brainer, but in fact, if you’re not regularly considering the long term, you might be impacting your own efficiency and the business’ productivity.
Using your vision to guide long-term decisions and efficiency
Whether you’re making critical business decisions or just everyday decisions, your business’ vision is an important guidepost. In our Run Like Clockwork Accelerator program (based on the book Clockwork by Mike Michalowicz) we guide our students to create or update their vision for their business — because, if you don’t have a vision, it becomes very challenging to make long-term decisions. Without a guiding vision for the business, you don’t have guideposts to help steer your decisions. But when you have a solid vision for your business, it becomes a lens through which you can view each and every decision you make. You can ask yourself: Will this bring me closer to my vision? Or is this simply going to address the pain I’m currently in right now — but isn’t going to be fruitful in the long term? Obviously, we want to make whatever current pain or problem we have right now go away, but only addressing the most pressing or painful problem puts us into “firefighting” mode rather than truly improving our productivity or efficiency.
Consider the root cause of efficiency and productivity problems
Another thing we talk a lot about in our Run Like Clockwork programs is finding the root cause. So often the problems we see on a daily basis in our businesses are actually symptoms of something deeper. Let’s say, for example, that you as the business owner are constantly having to fix mistakes your team has made — so much so that you decide it would be easier if you just did the work yourself. So you end up doing just that one thing yourself, which snowballs into doing more and more yourself until you end up firing the team and going back to delivering all the work yourself. That decision would certainly solve the surface problem of having to fix your team’s mistakes. But it would exacerbate your productivity and efficiency problems as a business.
Instead, if we slow down and look for the root cause of the problem, we might discover that the team isn’t getting enough training or the right kind of training in their onboarding process. Maybe there isn’t clear documentation for the team to understand what to do when they encounter a problem or question. Or maybe there isn’t a process set up for them to be able to make quality long-term decisions themselves.
Solving any of those problems isn’t a quick fix; it’s going to take much longer to create a new training process, or set up guidelines and systems for addressing problems that might arise. Yes, it’s easier and faster to do that “one thing” yourself today. But solving these root problems — building the system or training the team members properly — is going to set up the business to have fewer problems in the future.
And, to that idea of setting up the team to make autonomous decisions? That absolutely stems from having a clear vision for the business and sharing it with your team so that it can also guide their decisions. This sort of support and trust helps keep them out of short-term thinking, simply moving from task to task, and allows them to operate with a long-term mindset that will help them be more efficient and productive as well.
Use numbers and data to guide long-term thinking
In addition to having the vision to guide your long-term decisions, it’s also helpful to consider hard numbers and data in your business, especially your financials.
In our Run Like Clockwork Accelerator, we encourage our participants to consider cash flow projections when making decisions and to have those numbers available in a dashboard that’s easy to find and access. Look at what is coming in and what is going out of the business. What are you financially committed to, not just today or this month, but for the next quarter, the next year, and so on.
If you don’t have those sorts of numbers at hand, you might fall into short-term thinking traps. If you just paid a bunch of bills, you might feel financially strapped; or if you just made a big sale, you might be feeling rich. But neither of those feelings takes into consideration the jobs that may be already allocated to that money. Maybe you had saved for the bills, so it was no problem; or maybe you need the money from that big sale to help keep a team member on payroll for the next three months. That’s why we — and our Run Like Clockwork students — rely on a financial forecasting sheet that helps us project our income and expenses month-to-month for the next 12 months based on historical data. It works a little like a weather forecast: it’s accurate in the near term, but harder to predict the further out you go. But it’s still better than wandering around with no guidance at all. Money, in particular, can wrap us up in a lot of short-term feelings, but the same can be true of many different metrics in your business. Consider the most important numbers in your business and add those to your forecast.
Finding the balance
We know that Clockworking your business is hard work — and staying in long-term thinking can be hard work, as well. But we often tell our students: Twelve months from now you’re either going to be exactly where you are now, or you’re going to be in a much better place because you put the work in. That’s where you make the decision to put in the sweat equity to make the hard decisions — the long-term decisions — now, so that you can reap the rewards in the future. Time, like money, pays out compound interest. When you invest the time now to create a vision for your business, solve root problems instead of symptoms, and make your numbers easy to access so they can guide you, that investment will pay out huge dividends in the future.On the other hand, short-term thinking is like buying something on credit. Sure, it feels fast and easy now, but you’re just delaying the inevitable, and someday soon, this problem will resurface — with interest.
Start asking yourself a few qualifying questions when a problem arises to help make long-term thinking a habit. Ask:
Which decision aligns best with our vision for the business?
Is there a deeper root problem causing this symptom?
What’s the actual data around this question (instead of only going with your gut)?
Moving the needle toward long-term thinking in your business, even in small increments, will have big rewards in the long term for your efficiency, productivity, and Clockworking your business.