REVIEW: Rob Shallenberger and Steve Shallenberger — Do What Matters Most (BOOK)

Strategy experts and real-life father and son duo Rob Shallenberger and Steve Shallenberger know their stuff. When you read their new book, Do What Matters Most: Lead with a Vision, Manage with a Plan, Prioritize Your Time, read their article How to Do What Matters Most — And Raise Your Productivity Quotient, and visit the site for the elder Shallenberger’s firm Becoming Your Best Global Leadership, you can’t deny the consistency. In fact, the consistency is insane. Both Shallenbergers cut through any proverbial hedges, keeping the articulations on their prioritization philosophy clear, concise, and to-the-point.

URL: https://www.becomingyourbest.com/

There’s no literary hand-wringing or round-about way of coming to a simple and effective precept. For Shallenberger and Shallenberger, it’s merely a matter of stringing along a group of obvious elements into a less obvious, but supremely effective methodology. The Shallenbergers have been generous enough to extend facets of this proposed methodology not only through coaching courses and formulated discussion by way of Steve Shallenberger’s management firm, but also through the chameleonic array of books father and son have released over the years. Aside from Do What Matters Most, Shallenberger and Shallenberger have also released Becoming Your Best: The 12 Principles of Highly Successful Leaders, Start with the Vision: 6 Steps to Effectively Plan, Create Solutions, and Take Action, Conquer Anxiety: How to Overcome Anxiety and Optimize Your Performance, and even The Ultimate Guide On How To Succeed In High School. What both Shallenbergers promote is something that can be used universally across the board, and one can’t help but feel almost a sense of being duped given how obvious the ingredients themselves in such a formula prove to be.

For both Rob Shallenberger and Steve Shallenberger, boiling down the steps is simple. The goals as they see it are: Increase Your Productivity by Thirty to Fifty Percent, Adequately Schedule Your Priorities, Dispatch of Distracting Side Tasks That Hinder Productivity, Theoretically Analyze on What People Tend To Work On Versus What They Do, and Schedule Specific Periods of Time Based on Your Prioritized Scheduling Block.

Shallenberger and Shallenberger also cite President Dwight D. Eisenhower as an active, analogous example. He was able to develop, in Shallenberger and Shallenberger’s words, a time-accountability matrix. Breaking down daily activity and priority into four, distinctive quadrants, the first consisted of high priority tasks with the highest level of stress potential, the second also consisting of high priority tasks but with the lowest level of stress potential, the third consistent of high priority tasks lacking immediacy or urgency (i.e. ‘pro-forma’), and the fourth quadrant essentially mandating what qualifies as the equivalent to ‘Executive Time’ for one’s own activities. “In any organization, it isn’t just the individual’s responsibility to meet objectives and goals,” Shallenberger and Shallenberger have written. “…Interestingly, 80 percent of (executives) surveyed have no process for prioritizing their time in order to do what matters most. They rely on scattershot methods of leaving themselves post-it notes, making to-do lists, or delegating to an executive assistant.”

AMAZON: https://www.amazon.com/Do-What-Matters-Most-Prioritize/dp/1523092572

In short, this is a weakness people of all walks of life can benefit from seeing the light on. It’s that universality that makes the work of both Shallenbergers so potent, and so powerful

Colin Jordan