Let me count the ways that taking things for granted can cost you time and money. It creates aggravation and just destroys your day. Sorry, there are too many ways this can happen for me to count them; the number is just too high. Let's at least look at some of the biggest ways taking things for granted will absolutely destroy any chance you have of being productive and getting anywhere near the maximum amount done in the time it should take to complete.

The numbers are simply not in your favor. Even doing a simple task, something as simple as ordering something on the phone, how hard can that be? I want to place an order for a truck pick up at my factory. A simple run-through of the issues related to that seemingly simple task is 27 and rising as we speak. That's 27 questions/answers you should have asked or know before ordering, just to ensure that your truck will arrive where it should at the time it should. Another way to look at this issue is this way; there are 27 ways that things will not go as you assumed. Having things not go as you assumed is another polite way to say your truck will not arrive on time and will probably be the wrong truck size when it does arrive.

We are not leading up to saying that you have to question everything and never take any one's word for granted. What I'm saying is that on issues and points that are critical to the successful completion of your activity, verifying and ensuring things are correct and as you want them to be helps to ensure a successful conclusion.

How do you pick out the critical or pivotal points? How you figure that out is a reasonable question. On one-shot activities, you have to go with your experience, your instincts and what seems reasonable. There is no secret formula here, no set questions to ask and no checklist, especially if it's a one-off activity. Luckily for us, the majority of what we do is something we have done before and in most of those cases we have done them many times. Do not think in terms of having to dissect every step you take in a day, just start with the ones you take the most often and work backwards from there.

This would be an opportune time to reintroduce a theme we work on incessantly when we deal with productivity and production concepts. S.P.P., which stands for Systems, Policies and Procedures. For those of you who have come to our web sites and / or are members, you are familiar with how S.P.P. impacts our approach to increasing our production. The impact is immense and forms the backbone of our approach to this topic.

Having Systems, Policies and Procedures in place takes the guesswork out of what is and isn't in place. This topic is too immense to broach here but as it pertains to taking things for granted, guessing in other words, having S.P.P. in place is the only long-term sustainable course of action to follow. What is not sustainable and does not work is the approach that every time I do a specific task, I will reinvent the wheel each and every time. This thought process, one that I might add is very popular, is probably in the top 5 of all-time Productivity destroyers.

Taking things for granted and not spending sufficient time on planning, unfortunately, go hand in hand. The same people have a habit of just jumping in, assuming everything is in place and then wonder why nothing ever goes right and everything takes twice as long to accomplish. Taking things for granted and not planning in advanced are habits that too many people have acquired. If you see yourself in this group, I hope you can see what the consequences of these habits are having on your being able to accomplish your tasks in the time frame that you require.