Why are you always doing meaningless things?

Today's article comes from daily work thinking, and talks about the skills of doing things.

Everyone must have had this experience when working:

Why did I spend so much on this matter, but still no results?
Why do I keep walking around in one place and the project is not making any progress?
Why no progress after a one-day discussion meeting?
Why do I feel that what I am doing is worthless?

If you have these confusions, it means that what you are doing is probably meaningless.

The meaningless things are all uncertain things. Uncertain targets, uncertain conditions, uncertain boundaries, uncertain standards.

To illustrate this problem clearly, let me give an example below.

People who do new media advertising and marketing must have heard this sentence from your boss or client:

"Make me a hot product"

And usually this sentence will become a sentence immediately after:

"The less you spend, the better."

I know that many people have already begun to anxious, but we will know this is actually a meaningless thing if we simply go through it.

First of all, the hot product belongs to buying lottery tickets and hitting the big luck.

Based on my past interview experience and the cases of my friends around me, 99% of the teams that make a hit have never expected this thing to become a hit.

Even if you ask him to sum up his methodology and his experience of success, this is an afterthought. If you ask him to operate according to his original experience again, he will fail out of ten.

why?

It's simple. The success is about the right time and place.

You don't know what will happen suddenly tomorrow, or whether your well-designed product will encounter unexpected situations. Regarding this point.

When you can't fully control one thing, you can only do your job and obey the fate.

So if you are still asking your subordinates to think about how to make hot product, or how to make a big effect with a small budget, I advise you to give up as soon as possible.

Because these are all meaningless things.

With the time and energy spent on this, it is better to find those certain things that you can control, and that have been verified by facts to be successful.

Friends studying business must know the "Porter Five Forces Model". Don't think this thing is old-fashioned. In my opinion, this classic model from the 1980s is not out of date at all when used now.

When we analyze the market competition of a company, there are 5 dimensions to help us think, this is Porter's 5 forces (as shown below):

Let's see what's in it:

1. Threat of new entrants
2. Bargaining power of suppliers
3. Bargaining power of customer
4. Threat from substitutes
5. Rivalry among current players

Today I will not elaborate on this model, but I want to say another point:

Why are these 5 "forces"? Why not six "forces"? Can one of the "forces" be replaced?

With these problems, we continue to think about what problems you will encounter if you are an entrepreneur now and you want to survive in the market:

First of all, you always have a product to sell to customers. No matter what the product is, you must sell anything that can bring income.

So whether customers buy the products you produce, and how much they are willing to spend on your products, determine whether you can make money and how much money you can make (Bargaining power of customer).

Then, you always need the means of production to produce a product, and it is impossible to create something out of thin air. Since you need the means of production, someone will inevitably provide you with these things, so the role of the supplier comes out.

What quality production materials the supplier can provide you with, and how much you will spend to purchase these qualified production materials, determine how much your product will ultimately be, and how your profitability will ultimately be (Bargaining power of suppliers) .

Then, not only your family is making this product in this market.

For the same thing, if your peers produce better quality and lower prices than you, your sales will be affected and your income will drop (Rivalry among current players).

And it's not just the competitors. Companies in other industries don't always see you have a chance on this track, and they will come in and enter with big fond and resources. Then it will be a big threat. (Threat of new entrants).

Crueler, I don't play on the same level with you at all. People use the idea of reducing dimensionality to directly produce your substitutes, leaving you no business to do.

Amazon is not about making a better Wal-Mart or Carrefour, or moving all the products to computers and mobile phones, so that consumers can shop anytime and anywhere (Threat from substitutes).

So you see, these five forces basically think of all the problems that a company will encounter in order to gain a foothold in the market. One more is a repetition, one less one is not enough, it perfectly complies with the logical MECE (Mutually Exclusive Collectively Exhaustive) principle.

This is a certainty.

The essence of Porter's 5-force model is to take all the "uncertainties" encountered by enterprises in the face of market competition, and find ways to make it "deterministic".

The focus is on these 6 words, you can think of ways.

When doing everything, Don't do things blindly, don’t completely obey the destiny, but we have traces to follow, we have methods and means to analyze. try our best to make the "time, place, and people “ factor become artificially Controllable.

Back to the hot product issue mentioned earlier.

There may not be a fixed methodology for how to make a hot product, but there are a lot of vivid examples of how to fail to make a hit, to sum up experience and commonalities.

Take these things out, and then think of ways to avoid the pits that the predecessors have stepped on, this is a certainty.

Maybe you can't make a blockbuster product, but if you accumulate small steps like this, you will find that in the end, this method is more stable and practical than every time you hit the big luck, and gather sand into a tower.

And this is the meaningful things.

Inferring it into daily work, you can analyze the meaningless things you encounter, and see what are the reasons for the things that waste time and life

For example, without knowing what the client wants, he blindly starts to write a plan. After mentioning round after round, the hair fell out pile after pile, but the progress of the project did not move at all;
For example, when the core problem was not understood, colleagues from various departments were called to hold a meeting. Everyone rushed to solve the problem, but gradually discovered that the problem itself was not clear;
In addition, the goal that could not be achieved under the existing resource conditions, but the whimsical drawing of all kinds of pie, and finally it is totally a mess.

The seeds planted in the soil were wrong at the beginning, and no matter how fertilized and watered later, they would not grow good fruits. This way of doing things is tantamount to blind people touching the elephant and shooting at random.

If you see this at this moment, I strongly recommend that you suspend your work and review all the things you have done from today to now. Pick up the meaningless things and write them down one by one.

The result may be a shock to you because I actually did so much meaningless work in a day.

So how can we avoid, or in other words, how to make meaningless things more meaningful and improve our production efficiency?

Finally, I will provide a suggestion, which I have been practicing, and I recommend it to you only when the test is effective. Very simple in four words:

Determine the starting point.

The starting point for doing things is very important. Once the starting point is set incorrectly, it will greatly affect the subsequent work efficiency. You can use the following 3 starting points:

First, don't say anything that everyone already knows.

For example, when participating in the project, everyone knows the background of the project, so there is no need to repeat it. Focus on things that you don’t know, talk about your unique discoveries, talk about your new thinking, and talk about key points that were not mentioned in the meeting yesterday.

Try to push everyone to think forward and don’t get stuck in a circle. Make sure that you and everyone are at a level of information understanding before you start to act. This is the right starting point.

Second, don't do things with unclear goals.

A good goal must be something that everyone can perceive, foresee, and can immediately list an action plan from top to bottom.

Striving to become the industry's No. 1 is not a goal, it is more pertinent, it is a very illusory thing floating on the upper level.

Sales performance increases by 30% every year. This is the goal, can be break down to the KPI tasks of different subdivisions.

For example, the department in charge of channels can improve the tactile efficiency of consumers in some places; the department in charge of product design can use how to attract more people to pay attention to your products; the department in charge of marketing can be in some important layouts Marketing activities.

Whether your goal allows people to see what they can do in their minds is a successful goal setting. Conversely, if your goal is full of empty words, it is a meaningless goal.

Once you have a clear goal, you can reverse the specific actions of each person according to the goal, and decompose them to different responsible parties to become a perceptible plan.

The goal can be either the end or the starting point.

Third, start with the problems you can solve right now.

You can't be a fat man with one bite. Don't ignore the power of time.

The goal for yourself is to lose 10 KG a month, so don't expect to lose 5 KG on the first day. Don't think too much about the problems that cannot be solved at present, but put pressure on yourself and affect what you are doing now.

Sometimes we do meaningless things because of emotions. For example, if four project requirements are received in one morning, anyone's head will be blown up.

But if you listen carefully to the requirements and disassemble the details, you may find that these 4 projects are not for you to do it right away, nor will you get all of them, but just let you help some of them, or just let you provide Some opinions do not require you to do anything.

If you are a person who is good at planning, you can quickly sort these 4 projects according to important and urgent priorities, and then plan your time by category:

What can you do? What needs help from others? What can't be done now? What do you need to wait for others to give you information before you can start?

Remember, start with the problem you can solve. Those you can't solve, learn to hand it over to others, hand it over to time.

I wish you all a happy work =)