My wife and I were working on our monthly budget last night and were looking at where we could free up some dough so we could put more money aside for un-expected stuff, debt, vacations and so on.
Seems like every once in while we talk about the same ideas for managing our budget without anything coming of those discussions. Sound familiar? How often in your personal life or work life do you have the same conversations over and over again only to never realize the benefit? What’s the problem?
Discipline. For us, there just hasn’t been any sense of urgency to change anything about how we manage our finances. We know we “should” do something differently but we’re not disciplined about executing on it.
What I often hear from teams is that ‘we have no time’ to do our improvements. There is just too much work to get done. Bullshit I say. What they are really saying is we haven’t made improving a priority. Discipline is really, really tough. It forces organizations and teams to prioritize and make real decisions instead of simply deciding not to decide.
A colleague I used to work with brought this phrase to my attention. If we keep doing what we’re doing, we’re going to keep getting what we’re getting. If you want your outcome to change, change your behavior and be disciplined with your approach. If you choose not to behave differently and use “no time” as the excuse for not being disciplined the only results you’re likely to get are metrics that mean absolutely nothing.