I found myself zipping down the freeway yesterday morning en route to meet with a client, thinking about an upcoming house move, when I pulled in behind a huge house moving van.

Nothing unusual about that. But this moving van happened to catch my eye because the rear, roll up door and one entire side was covered in multiple layers of graffiti indicating that it had been tagged by someone several times on different occasions.

Beneath the graffiti was to be found the company contact information, listing the services that the moving company provides and extolling their virtues, specifically how much care they will take when moving you.

Mixed message?

No matter what you say, or how good your service may be, as a potential customer all I can see is that the proprietor isn’t taking care of the details by cleaning off the graffiti.

If a company cannot take the time or care to make its own public face presentable, in this case the moving vehicles, there is no way I would believe you could ever take the time and care to treat my own treasured possessions with respect.

Want to send a strong, positive message to potential customers that you are professional and capable? Present your best public face with the message you want people to hear. Let someone else dictate the message you send, in this case, the graffiti artist, and no matter how good the service or product you provide actually is, people will stop listening.

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Do you deal mostly with urgent tasks in your day-to-day work?

Unless you are a fire fighter or paramedic most of your work should consist of well-planned, directed tasks. Tasks that should have been decided upon well in advance, days or perhaps even weeks ahead of time. You should be able to predict, with a reasonable degree of accuracy, what you will be working on for any day in the next two weeks.

And if you cannot do that, then you have two problems.

The first problem is that you are dealing mostly with unplanned for, urgent tasks. Tasks that just seem to appear out of nowhere and consume most of what should be a productive work day. This is the kind of work that causes stress, temper tantrums and really sub-standard work.

You might feel as though you are accomplishing a lot each time you take care of some urgent problem that has just come to your attention but you are actually wasting a lot of effort, but more importantly, a lot of valuable time, dealing with issues that should have been planned, days or weeks in advance.

The hitch with emergencies is that because there is so little warning, there is very little planning or first-rate, quality problem solving that goes in to the solution.

The main goal of “urgent” is to get whatever the problem is, out of the way, as quickly as possible, so that you can get back to what you were doing previously.

By ignoring problems or things to be done, until just before they are needed, you are operating entirely in crisis management mode when communication is at a minimum and solutions are less than optimal.

Urgent tasks in a well run life or business are so rare that the procrastination that took place to turn a boring, routine task into an emergency is unfathomable and indicative or a deep problem.

The second problem you face of dealing with anything urgent is that you have no personal control of what you work on.

Whether the task was devised by you, or given to you by someone you work for, if it has become urgent, it means you are not in control and somebody else is dictating to you how you should perform your job. And under those conditions, you cannot do your best work, ever.

If you are dealing with more than one urgent task in any single workweek, you’re doing it wrong.

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