Spontaneity is the key to success. If you are too planned in your work life, it robs the freshness in your approach. For example, imagine spontaneously calling a client to ask about his health and in return ending up with a fresh order vis a vis calling him for an order itself and not getting one. The odds are better in the former case. In the latter case, you are already weak in your knees since you have rehearsed the picture in mind before you call and lost the freshness. The latter is a poor proposition also because there is an element of desperation involved.
Having said this, I would like to add that the flip side of spontaneity is poor time management, which needs to be balanced out. When it comes to time scheduling, a person should have a planned approach and not a spontaneous one.
Given my free-spirited nature, any amount of planning has always been an overwhelm for me. Not scheduling my time kept me free and joyful. From that space, I attended to work as and how it came to me. I did this for more than a decade. But I now see its flip side. Not scheduling your time gets you caught in doing things that give you instant gratification or it makes you busy in fire fighting. Urgent things take precedence over important things. And as per Stephen Covey, the famous author of Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, this is a big time management error. I couldn’t agree more.
So, while you may retain your spontaneity in your communications and your general approach to life, let go of this spontaneity when it comes to time management. More or less, have a calendar that is divided into time blocks. Have lots of variety of weekly time blocks eg. Time block for introspection on each project, time block for internal team training, time block for upgrading on your own domain knowledge, time block for learning new technology etc. A variety of such weekly time blocks will ensure that you don’t miss out on any activity that is instrumental to your success.
And yes remain free-spirited enough to cancel or postpone any of these whenever need arises or you feel strongly inclined to do something else. This combination of planning and spontaneity can do the trick for you. Success is all about doing that tight rope walk between your left and right brain.
