Prioritisation Matters – A Story about my Phone
I’ve been intending to tell this story for a couple of months now, but prevarication is a terrible thing, as we will see.
I owned – well, I still do – a Huawei mobile phone that I got on a monthly contract with Vodafone in (I think) 2017, although it may have been a little earlier. In October 2021 I fell off my bicycle (embarrassing, 200 yards from home, going up a slightly higher than I expected kerb). I fell onto my phone which was in my pocket, the rear casing got badly cracked, so I “repaired” it with Sellotape. I had the intention to replace the phone from then onwards, but it did work, and I replaced the tape every few months.
Finally I went into the Vodafone shop in Camberley in May. My first visit, it turned out I had to change something on my account before they could do anything for me – that was a bit of a process. So I went back a couple of weeks later and I’m sorry to say the two women working in the shop laughed at me! Twice!
They had met me once before so maybe they felt more comfortable having a good laugh when they saw the state of my phone. Apparently the Sellotape was funny, can’t see why myself… But then the woman who was helping me laughed again when she opened my account on her system and saw the charges. It was perhaps more of a gasp than a laugh. “You’re paying how much a month?” she exclaimed.
Well of course I had been suffering from the “inflation plus 79.3%” or whatever it is standard contract for 7 or 8 years, and I didn’t really even look at the monthly direct debit to be honest. I hate to admit it, but it was about £40 a month for an ancient, knackered phone and really not very much data at all!
There was some more chuckling when she did the transfer of data to the new phone, which took ages – “your old phone was pretty much on its last legs”, she said.
The Vodafone staff were great actually, I went for the buy my own phone option then a monthly contract and they saved me £50 on the phone by suggesting something surprising, which I won’t repeat here in case it gets them into trouble. So I have ended up with a total cost of ownership that has probably reduced by 50% and gives me much a better contract, hardware and capability.
So, apart from giving you the chance to have a laugh at me, supposedly a serious and experienced procurement professional, why am I telling you this? It just struck me that putting things like this off is always very easy. There always seemed something more urgent or important to do rather than take an hour or two to go and sort out my phone. I was procrastinating for over two years. Or there was an excuse. “I won’t replace it just before Reading Festival in case I lose it / gets damaged” etc.
And we do tend to do the same in our working lives. We know we should review that contract, or look for a new supplier because our current one isn’t really performing, or check out the latest market forecasts and see if we should go “long” on that commodity. But something more urgent comes up. Our internal customer wants to see us NOW. The CFO wants a report on how to save 10% on everything by Christmas. If I don’t go online at 10am I won’t get my Taylor Swift tickets…
But the cost of delaying all mounts up. In my case, it’s not just the fact that I probably overpaid by the best part of a thousand pounds over the last few years, it is also that I missed the functionality I could have had with a new phone. So prioritisation, which must be accompanied by good general planning, is an undervalued skill in my opinion. I’ve worked with people who were brilliant in almost every way, but could not prioritise. If this is you, it is important, do work on it.
Clearly, I’m not perfect (!), but also have a think about whether you’re missing some possibly quick and easy wins, in work or in life generally, just because you “never get round to it”.
