Assist Yourself First
At Extract, we love helping others do their jobs more efficiently and accurately. Sometimes, though, it’s so easy to get caught up in helping others you don’t do what you need to help yourself. We have all heard the adage “before you help others, help yourself.” Whether at the office, at home, or, famously, in the airline safety demonstration. Yet, it is a message that has a spotty track record of being heeded. Why?
A big reason has to do with where tasks fall in the four quadrants of time management. If you divide tasks into important vs not important, you might assume the important ones are the one that get the most attention. Surprisingly, not always. Tasks can also be divided into urgent and not urgent categorizations. As Alex Czarto’s blog post explains well, Quadrant 3 tasks that are urgent (but ultimately not important) and often divert a large amount of time that would be better spent on Quadrant 2 tasks that are important, even if not urgent.
This is particularly true for situations that involve helping or responding to others. Even when we know there are important things we need to do, when others run into problems or make requests, too frequently we are willing to push off important Quadrant 2 tasks to because we are anxious to be as responsive as possible. We often assume when doing so we are being productive by keeping up on all urgent tasks, whether important or not. But too often we mistake busy for accomplishment. Instead, we can accomplish more, even when it comes to helping others, if we first take care of the Quadrant 2 tasks that allow us to be as productive as possible.
At Extract, we specialize in helping others with Quadrant 2 initiatives; initiatives that ultimately help prevent urgent issues from arising. By ensuring the processing of document images are handled efficiently and accurately, our solutions thereby reduce urgent issues triggered by delayed or inaccurate document handling. We take pride and pleasure in doing so.
But as much as we are in tune with the four quadrants of time management, we are not immune from the temptation to push off Quadrant 2 tasks. Our VP of Services, Rob Fea, not long ago challenged all of us here at Extract to develop strategies to ensure we get to those important (if not urgent) Quadrant 2 tasks.
Some of these efforts have manifested themselves in improved processes. For the engineering team here at Extract, it means putting our skills to use on a roadmap that includes tools to make us more efficient in deploying and supporting our software. Examples include a tool to streamline handling of licensing, streamlined installation tools, and improved error and alerting features to enable our services team to quickly distinguish the important from unimportant notifications in our customer deployments. This ensures important issues receive prompt attention and root causes identified and resolved. So when reviewing notes for recent releases our software such as 11.5 and 11.6 as well as releases over the coming year or so, know that in addition to expanding the capabilities of our software in serving you, we are assisting ourselves by enhancing capabilities of our team to help you with your own Quadrant 2 initiatives.
If you’d like to learn more about how Extract can help your organization streamline extraction, redaction, and indexing processes to reduce urgent issues from cropping up, please reach out.
