Having great ideas that will improve the running of your care home or home care business or take it to the next level is one thing. Making it happen is a whole other thing.
It’s too easy to fall back into the day-to-day and so hard to step back and spend time ON your business instead of IN it.
Read this post to find out why.
In my last three posts I talked about how to prepare for having a relaxing holiday with minimal interruptions from work and how to take advantage of the creative juices that may start to spring from your relaxed, decluttered mind.
In the last, third, post I took you through 5 key steps to turn the big ideas you hopefully had, into reality. Of course, doing that – making it happen – is the next challenge.
Executing a big idea, that takes a business forward or resolves a big challenge is hard, especially when you have a million and one things on your desk vying for your attention.
How often have you had tasks you wanted/intended to do but couldn’t because of interruptions or others needing your attention?
Have you got important tasks (like fee reviews) that aren’t getting done because other quick-fix tasks get your attention?
How hard do you find it to step back and stay focused on the one big thing you need to get done?
If you or your people aren’t as productive as you’d like then you are by no means alone.
When I started delivering training on productivity a few years ago, I wanted to really understand why we find it so hard to stay on task and complete on time.
The research revealed some fascinating facts – well, to me they were fascinating.
I found out that that we are in fact wired to be unproductive. It’s not our fault (well, not entirely) – it’s Mother Nature’s.
Our Brains are Wired to be Unproductive
Our pre-frontal cortex manages, among other things, personality, behaviour, decision-making and problem-solving. It fosters curiosity and the desire to learn, which is of course wonderful.
Unfortunately, this curiosity means it loves to be distracted.
This desire to be distracted was a vital life-saving mechanism for our distant ancestors who, to survive another day without being eaten or injured, needed to be distracted. If that slight movement in nearby bushes is something considering making you their lunch, you want to be aware of it.
When my school reports repeatedly said I was easily distracted, it wasn’t my fault. When someone walks into a room and you look up to see who it is, it’s not your fault. When your phone pings to tell you that you have a text message and you instantly reach for it to see who it is, it’s not your fault and when your email program tells you that you have new emails in your inbox, and you immediately click to see – it’s not your fault.
But it’s clearly not what we need when we’re trying to stay on task and be productive.
We’re Rewarded for Doing Lots of Small Tasks
When you complete a task your pre-frontal cortex, and other areas of your brain, receives a shot of a “feel-good” hormone called dopamine, as a reward.
But this reward happens no matter how trivial a task is. Your brain cannot differentiate between what is important and what isn’t and so rewards you the same whether the task is filling an empty bed (for the fee you need), answering a text message or crossing a busy road safely.
We love dopamine and the feeling we have when we complete a task. This means if we’re not disciplined and focused enough, we will naturally stay busy switching between lots of small tasks and feel good and feel that we’re achieving.
We are busy being busy but fooling ourselves into thinking that we’re being productive, and our brain is supporting the lie by rewarding us.
We Cannot “Multitask”
Let’s get one thing straight – regardless of gender – we can’t multi-task. Our brain cannot process two pieces of information at the same time.
Instead, millions of neurons rapidly switch from one thing to the next – they cannot independently work on resolving two things in parallel.
All this switching has both a cognitive cost and a metabolic cost.
Cognitive cost – Trying to do several things at once involves, as I said, millions of neurons rapidly switching between tasks, 100 of times a second.
This produces cortisol, the stress hormone, which – yep, you guessed it – increases your stress. This also releases adrenaline, and your brain can very quickly become over stimulated, scrambled and foggy. Decision-making becomes hard.
Imagine the tired mum who shouts at her kids to stop because she can’t “hear herself think” as they run around her shouting and vying for her attention.
I’m sure you’ve had the situation of people needing time with you to sort out an immediate problem. Having given guidance or instructions you then think “now where was I?” and spend valuable time getting your head back to where it was. A two-minute interruption will always take you more than that to get back on task.
Metabolic cost – Our brain weighs around 2% of an average person’s total body weight and yet consumes around 20% of total energy. It’s a very hungry organ. All these neurons switching hundreds of times a second consumes a huge amount of your energy and is tiring.
So, “multi-tasking” consumes the available energy very rapidly – the same energy (glucose) that’s needed to focus and stay on task.
So, our brain loves shiny objects and is very easily distracted. It is wired to complete lots of tasks – and it rewards us for doing so – no matter how trivial the task. Staying on task results in fewer dopamine hits – much less satisfying.
But all this switching makes us confused, unable to make important decisions and makes us stressed and tired.
But not only is being productive and staying on task naturally difficult for us, to make it even harder, in addition to interruptions, we are surrounded with information overload. There is more information at our fingertips via our mobile phone than we need to make an informed decision.
This information overload presents another challenge.
When given too much choice, research has shown that we struggle to decide.
There’s a famous “jam stall” experiment where a market stall was laden with lots of jams of different flavours. Faced with too much choice, people struggled to decide on a jam and walked away without making a purchase. When the stall only displayed a few jam jars, faced with less choice and fewer decisions, sales increased.
Ignoring something has its own cognitive and metabolic cost. Ignoring a new phone message or email, that you know is there because you’ve been ‘pinged’, is something your brain must continuously decide to do because it instinctively wants to see the message or email.
Hard though it is to stay on task and not allow interruptions to divert us or too much information to confuse us, being able to is vital.
Being unproductive and not getting round to carrying out these bigger tasks can harm your business in many ways including financially.
For example, if you’ve read my posts and latest report, 5 Steps to make Your Care Business Financially Secure in 2023 and Beyond, you’ll know that I’m all about your top priority being the financial health of your care home or home care business. And I’m a bit of a stuck record regarding making sure your current fees are correct and the importance of carrying out a fee review to make sure. (I make no apology for this because I know that way too many care providers are struggling financially.)
Reviewing your fees is a big task with several important steps that must be carried out in order to get it right. It’s a task that could easily sit on your to-do list for weeks, whilst other short-term tasks and issues land on your desk and grab your attention.
But if a fee review reveals that you have clients making you next to no profit or a even a loss, then each week this task isn’t carried out is another week that your care business is taking a financial hit. It is a path that will eventually lead to insolvency.
Do you have a big task or idea or goal that you are struggling to implement? If you do, what’s the impact on your care home or home care service if you don’t do it? Use this to help you prioritise implementing this task and check my previous post to see how to make it happen.
Being productive and helping your people be productive is a vital element to the success of your business. If work isn’t being completed on time or is sub-standard then assuming the capability and resource is in place, then productivity could well be the problem and must be addressed.
In my next post I’ll give you some tips to improve productivity.
If you think you and your people could be more productive, then get the help you need to make it happen because the underlying impact on your business can be massive. Contact me to see how I can help.
