Finishing Projects You Start

May 10, 2012

Interview with Chris McChesney, co-author of the book The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals

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Mike Carruthers:
Whether at work or in your personal life it’s common to take on a new project but never quite get around to it.

Chris McChesney:
The problem is that typically when there is that new thing to do there’s 7 or 8 other new things as well competing for its attention.
 

Chris McChesney, co-author of the book The 4 Disciplines of Execution...  

And what we found is that people really have a hard time saying, “OK there’s everything I’m doing to just to maintain my life.” And that’s not going to go away so if I am going to do something new let’s just do 1 thing – let’s not try and do 7 new things right now. And the second part of that 1st rule is to also put it in the form of a finish line and say, “What’s the exact achievement and by when?”

As simplistic as it may sounds you will more likely get projects completed if you create a visual scoreboard.

You’ve got to have some visual manifestation and this just sort of works for people. Regardless of whether it’s an individual goal or whether it’s an organizational goal. Can I instantly look at some physical scoreboard and tell, “Am I winning, or am I losing?

And accountability to someone else will almost always make it more likely a project will get done.

Because what we do with ourselves, we always tell ourselves we can do it, but what we end up doing personally is we cut ourselves a little bit of slack, oh I’ll get to that, I’ll do that - whereas if you’ve got accountability to somebody else you’ve got to do it.

To hear the complete unedited interview, click here.