Focus To Accomplish More

The Noble Foundation Agricultural Division assists agricultural producers and land stewards in attaining their financial, quality-of-life and stewardship goals. Although a goal may be easily defined, accomplishing it can be complicated. Every aspect of an agricultural operation affects every other aspect in some way, either directly or indirectly. Take, for instance, a production goal of a 90 percent calf crop. This measure of reproductive performance depends on things like nutrition, herd health, forage production, calving season, stocking rate and grazing management; not to mention soil fertility and water quality.

In the early years of the Noble Foundation's consultation program, specialists would provide the consultation client, known as a cooperator, with a complete farm plan covering virtually every aspect of their operation. This was a document so extensive that it required binding into a book. Over the decades, our consultation process has changed. Today, we still work with cooperators to identify, prioritize and address the primary obstacles relative to where they are and where they want to be. We focus on two or three of the most important goals and suggest a priority order for "attacking" them one at a time. When one goal is accomplished, the producer is encouraged to move on to the next most important task. This approach has resulted in greater success for cooperators, which translates to greater success for our consultation program.

The evolution of our consultation process spans more than 60 years and is where it is today due to trial and error, persistence and common sense. Interestingly, research in recent years has proven the advantages of focusing on fewer tasks, as opposed to multitasking a broad array of things that need to be done. It has been shown that multitasking is less efficient and takes longer than focusing on one task at a time. There is less brain power required, as switching between tasks takes time and effort to mentally "gear down" on the current one and "rev up" for the next. This inefficiency increases with the complexity of the tasks.

A few of the signs of chronic multitasking are short-term memory loss, an inability to concentrate, problems communicating with others - even shortness of breath and other classic stress-related symptoms.

Although this research was not agriculturally based, it fits us just as well as any other business. A modern resource manager must constantly assimilate a multitude of factors related to his agricultural operation, identify and prioritize the associated tasks, and set about getting them done. There is a danger, though, of "getting too many irons in the fire," "passing ourselves coming and going" and "not seeing the forest for the trees." It seems the most successful are able to focus on and accomplish the one or two most important things at a time and do them well before moving to the next task at hand. It makes sense to me.