The biggest excuse that you are likely to hear in your business is, “I didn’t have time to do it.” You will be on the receiving end of this, no doubt, multiple times every week, where you ask somebody to do something, and when you get to the deadline or you ask them where it is, they say, “Oh, I didn’t have time to do that.” If we were to be completely honest with ourselves, that is such a load of rubbish. If somebody was going to be completely honest in that moment when you ask them that question, it would sound a little bit more like this: “Oh, I forgot to plan it in,” or “I left it to the last possible moment and I ran out of time to do it,” “I didn’t think it was important enough,” “I didn’t really understand exactly what you needed me to do, so I procrastinated around it.”
“I didn’t have enough time,” “I ran out of time,” “I had too many things to do” is an excuse. Make sure that it doesn’t come out of your mouth, and when it comes out of the mouths of the team members that report to you, then challenge them. To say “I ran out of time” doesn’t enable somebody to take full responsibility for how their actions played a part in the thing not happening that they should have done in the first place.
I’m a realist. I know that we all have lots of different things to do, but what I find is that people who don’t get things done are the people that never planned to get things done in the first place. Things that are important and not urgent in nature will absolutely get forgotten if you don’t book them into your diary, if you don’t plan to do those things. And it is exactly the same with your team members. If you want to get more done, don’t accept “Oh, I didn’t have time to do that.”
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