Yesterday Matt Steinfort (Envysion CEO) held an all hands meeting in which – for the first time since we were a tiny company with a small office – the entire staff was in the same room (we can do this because we have the Envysion lounge thanks to the Cultural Committee but that’s fodder for a future post). The purpose of the meeting was to share with the entire company the strategy for the rest of this year and 2009.

I don’t need to tell you that the economy stinks right now and that times are tough all over.  Matt spoke about the prospects for our company which are very strong thanks to the hard work of the management team in general but especially Michael Wilson who was our Finance Director but is now our CFO – a very well deserved promotion. Michael is somewhat of a magician as it applies to finances and has ensured that we are in a terrific position financially regardless of the economy in the near term.

That said, Matt wasn’t painting a rosey picture. One of the key messages he delivered is that we need to be better at what we do and that we need to focus on doing only those things that support our customers and the business. This can be boiled down to doing what’s important vs. doing what’s urgent. This is an age old struggle that effects every business and it certainly has plagued us.

The concept is simple but the execution can be difficult. At the heart of the concept is the thesis that one can only accomplish so many things in a given time period. In today’s world the list of tasks to choose from is often overwhelming. In order to be most effective one should strive to do only those things that support one’s Wildly Important Goals – these tasks are the important ones – and ignore whenever possible those tasks that don’t.

There’s a great post about this at PickTheBrain called Important vs. Urgent: 5 ways to focus on what really matters.

In our case we know what our WIGs are because Matt oultined them for us. So in order to be effective we need to do only those tasks and participate only in those activities which support those goals.

I’ll be posting more about this in the future and I’d love to hear your thoughts and opinions on the topic.