3

When you want to find the time to communicate brilliantly

Time is never about time. It’s about priority.

In other words, there’s always the time you need to communicate brilliantly. The question is whether it’s a high priority for you, compared to everything else that’s going on.

If you do think it’s important, it will need to feature prominently in your Priority Place – the place where you list your important actions. This will, I guess, be your diary or To-Do List.

And you’ll often get quicker, better results if you put three reminders in your Priority Place, not one. Let me explain.

How to Find the Time You Need

Important communications have three elements: the preparation, delivery and follow-up.

However, people often only put one or two of these in the diary, that is, the delivery (and sometimes the preparation).

But this means you have to fit the follow-up (and, if you haven’t diarized it, the preparation) around your priorities in your diary. In my experience, this results in people:

  • Prepping at home at the last minute (or not doing any at all).
  • Not following-up well (or ever).

This reduces your chances of a good outcome:

  • Poor preparation often leads to poor communication.
  • Zero follow-up often leads to zero action.

Admittedly, preparation and follow-up take time. But nowhere near as much as you’ll spend chasing up a communication that didn’t work. So, to prioritize your pre/post work, use three diary entries:

1. Put “Preparation” in the diary, at a time when (a) your brain is at its best (morning?) and (b) you’re unlikely to bump it in favor of other priorities.
2. Diarize your delivery as you usually would (the techniques in this book – especially this section – will reduce the time you need for this, since your communications will be much shorter).
3. Diarize “Follow-up” immediately after the delivery. This could well only be a five-minute diary entry, but it helps you roll the “momentum snowball” you wanted your communication to initiate. This follow-up could be as simple as a standard email that you tailor to each situation, something like:

c3-fig-5002

One final thought about this chapter: it assumes you’re in control and that you’ve the time to free up more time for preparation/follow-up.

Sometimes, the world’s not like this and you find yourself having to deliver important communications with zero preparation time. The next chapter shows a very effective way to do this.

c3-fig-5003

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