Filed under: Uncategorized
“How is it working for you?’
Dr Phil
Sorting out an entire booklet of “stick it notes”; all of them with cryptic clues for my “To do list” for the life of me I can’t figure out what they were for. Some are abbreviations for something or the other. A couple are for calling Koos, only problem, I have a dozen entries for Koos on my cell phone, Koos 1 right through; not to mention Koos Van 1 etc. As I am about to throw the whole lot in the rubbish bag, I go through it again, I come across one that I finally remember what it was for. MTN was all I wrote, why would I write MTN, dialing an MTN number irritates me.
“You’ve reached the voice mail like service….BLAH BLAH press one and MTN will send the subscriber an sms” Yello if I wanted to send an sms I would have, why cant they have an answering service, where I can leave a voice message.
So why would I write MTN. After some thinking, I remember coming back from Natal, at Mooi River Plaza toll gate, we were given an MTN booklet, thinking about junk mail for want of a better term, even getting into the cars. Riffling the pages of the full colour booklet, I wondered how much it cost for the useless campaign, and mentioned it. My better half told me I had taken the booklet, opened it so it wasn’t useless.
I explained my reason why I thought it was useless.
• How much did it cost them to print that booklet?
• How could they track the outcome of the campaign?
• For the same price could they have done a more affective campaign?
Go into any hypermarket, supermarket even mini market, you can buy a sim card for under R3-00. So instead of dishing out pamphlets dish out sim cards, at the start of the holiday periods, have programs set up to monitor when the sim cards are activated recharged etc. Done at the start of the holiday periods when people have money, no point doing it after wards no body has any money left. With technology which is available it is relatively simple to track the outcome of the campaign, when one considers the traffic going through Mooi River Plaza, the figures I have are a couple of years old and taken over an Easter Weekend. Do the maths get 5% of that traffic activating and recharging.
This is the traffic per day, I do know that this year was higher, over twenty Thousand.
After that digression, which is another reason why my “To Do Lists” don’t work, my habits and thoughts are like my “To Do Lists”, scattered and fragmented not focused on the job at hand. A while back I figured I needed a note book, to jot these things down in, I became too verbose and bored myself with information overload. Between too little information and too much detail nothing that had to get done got done.
What is needed for “To Do Lists” to work?
• Precise entries
• Not so that it reads like Tolstoy’s War And Peace, but precise enough to have clear picture what needs to be done.
• Organizing
Which, What, When, How.
Which one on the list first, what needs to be done, when will it be finished and how is going to be done?
Putting everything on a list, which is why it is called a “To Do List” and not a “To Do It Stick It Note” all this helps in the final step.
Focus!
Andrew Carnegie, an American industrialist once paid a small fortune for a piece of advice, the advice was simply this, write down everything you need to do, next rate them by importance, 1 for most important etc. Then start working from the top down. I first read that about forty years ago, but never seriously implemented it, nothing gets done by knowing, it gets done by doing; to help keep me on this track I now have a “To Do List” from Microsoft. As the person who gave Andrew Carnegie that advice said, “If it doesn’t work with this system it won’t work with any other system.
The top of my “TO DO LIST” was to write “ABOUT PARROTS AND WEBSITES”
That will have to wait for tomorrow.
(Sponsor Link: OfferForge | kalahari.net | bidorbuy )
No Comments so far
Leave a comment
Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>