Keep Your Workers in Shape with "Sprints"

Give your employees generous deadlines, and tasks will expand to fit the time allotted. Provide shorter deadlines, and the office will always be humming. In a recent conversation, ETR's senior staff writer, Charlie Byrne, who is in training for a marathon, illustrated the point with this non-business parallel:

"While the primary goal of most beginning marathoners is to simply finish, after several successes, you want to start finishing faster. Doing occasional short but fast sprints trains your body and brain to know what additional speed 'feels like.' When you return to the more typical longer, slower workouts in the following days, you start picking up the pace -- because what used to be a normal pace suddenly feels slow. Then, on race day, your body and mind 'remember' what that speed felt like, and what the distance feels like -- and, with any luck, you combine them into a winning formula."

So, if your business often deals with lengthy projects, you should periodically train your employees for the "long race" by creating some "sprints" for them. I'm not just talking about daily or weekly milestones within the extended project. I mean short tasks that your team can complete readily in several hours or a day.

Afterward, you'll probably find that the pace of their "regular work" will be just a bit livelier.

Michael Masterson
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This article appears courtesy of Early to Rise [Issue #1039, 01-13-04], the Internet's most popular health, wealth, and success e-zine. For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.earlytorise.com/.