Do you get trapped fighting the fires of daily business crises? Your day starts out with hopes of working on that big, important project. Then you look at your email inbox and there are forty messages, ten of which have the dreaded “!”. Your voicemail has eight messages you don’t even want to bother with after being already overwhelmed by your email. You get a 9-1-1 text from a sales rep. You haven’t even had your first cup of coffee.

Then you start to dive in to each crisis. The first one you fix successfully. The second one should have been handled by someone else, but since you are someone who gets stuff done, you get the call/ email/ text for help- and then you commit the sin of fixing it. The third one you start to dive into and suddenly it just sucks you into one thing after another after another- and it doesn’t get prettier with each revelation of new information. The fourth one was not a crisis, but the person sending you the crisis message thinks everything is a crisis. Since you responded, you get it resolved anyway.

So the day goes- pull the fire hose out and start to squirt everywhere. You have one hose, but it seems like fifty fires. The day ends, you are exhausted, you put the fire hose away, and leave the smoldering remains of your office- knowing that something else will spontaneously combust overnight and be waiting for your arrival the next day.

Then you think about it. You worked your tail off. You are exhausted. But you accomplished nothing. That big project you wanted to work on? Didn’t put one second of time on it. Yet you know that working on it will either pay off big time down the road or prevent a major crisis from occurring.

What was the big project? Fire prevention process development and training for your team. But, you didn’t have time for it- you were too busy fighting fires.

So, how do you get out of operating in a constant 9-1-1 mode? Maybe you just have to let some people get burned so they figure out they need to help. Others need to understand they can’t yell “fire!” unless there is a fire. Not all fires are of equal crisis mode: figure out which ones you will have to leave burn while paying attention to the really important ones. Get everyone involved- the only way you can fight a fire effectively is with a team effort to put out the fire. Finally, take prudent measures to prevent the fires to begin with- and make sure everyone is accountable to holding that objective.

Take it from Smokey the Bear: “Remember, only YOU can prevent forest fires!”