Areas of Focus -V- Your Core Tasks

Do you find distinguishing between the important and the trivial difficult? Well, this week, that’s the question I’m answering this week.

 

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Script

Episode 132

Hello and welcome to episode 132 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

There’s a huge difference between trivial and critical tasks and I am pretty sure most of you listening know that. But, while we may think we understand this difference, how many of us actually know the difference between the two? Well. I shall be answering that question this week.

Now, before we get to the question and answer. For those of you who have already joined my Time Sector course, I just want to let you know that I have added two classes based on some of the questions that were asked. The first is how to manage actionable email and the second how to create a master projects list. So, if you have taken the course and have not seen those additional classes, they are there in the course now.

And if you have not joined yet, you can still get the course for $39.99 for a couple more days. The early bird special offer will be ending very soon, so please don’t miss out. This course is revolutionary and will change the way you manage your work and your tasks for the better. Gone will be the overwhelm of an unwieldy projects list, tasks will no longer disappear and die in a bottomless pit of tasks hidden inside old, out of date projects and instead, you will have a very active list of tasks that require a lot less time to manage. 

Full details of the course are in the show notes.

Okay, on with the show and that means it’s now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question. 

This week’s question comes from Sonia. Sonia asks: Thank you, Carl, for the great Time Sector course. It has really simplified the way I manage my work. I have a question about what you describe as “core tasks” could you explain a bit more what you mean by these and how they are different from areas of focus? 

Thank you, Sonia, for your question. 

I felt adding a section about “core tasks” was important because I have noticed a lot of people get caught up in trivialities, falsely believing these trivialities are important to the success of a goal or a project. They are not and often they cause distraction from the main objective and contribute to the project’s or goal’s failure 

Now, to define a “core task” you should ask yourself: what are the tasks I do that directly contributes to my income, career and life success? 

Now, this may not be as easy as it first appears. Often the work that directly contributes to your income, career and life success is not obvious. To give you a simple example:

Let’s imagine you want to become a champion body-builder. What would be the “core tasks” that will help you to reach the goal of becoming a champion bodybuilder? 

The two core tasks would be lifting weights and diet. 

This means that as long as you make sure you do your workouts every day and you eat the right foods, you will have contributed 80% of the work you need to achieve your goal.

However, if you were just starting out with this goal you would also need to find the right gym, get the right personal trainer (at least to start with), the right workout clothes, the right supplements and the right training programmes. 

There’s actually quite a lot that needs to be done in order to get close to achieving the goal of becoming a champion body-builder. 

Now, in this example, if you are not focused on your core tasks—the weight lifting and diet, it does not matter how many personal trainers you interview, what the gym looks like or the training programme is, you are never going to achieve your goal. Yet, often, people focus on these trivialities and they never move their goal forward. 

The same problems occur with weight loss and other lifestyle changes you may want to make. If you have not identified the core tasks that will directly contribute to your goal’s success, then you will be running round in circles making very little progress. 

Take for example something that happened last week. A student in my Time Sector course wrote to tell me the editing was off in some of the classes in the course. I went through every video and checking them and discovered that one video should have been trimmed .227 of a second sooner. A cut that 99% of people would not have noticed. 

Now, in this situation, the writer was correct, the edit was off. But only .227 of a second off and only in one video. The question I had to ask myself was is this relevant? Does having ‘perfectly’ edited videos contribute to the course’s overall objective? The answer is no. Not at all.

The overall objective of the course is to educate. Now, the videos do contribute to that, but they do not need to have to the second perfect edits to achieve that goal. This means editing is not a core task in this project. Editing is an ‘important’ part, but it is not a critical part of the course’s development and overall success.

My core tasks are to educate people on the subject of time management, productivity and goal planning. That to me is why I am here. I love helping people and I love being in the education field. That is my core and anything that allows me to help people and educate, those will be my core tasks.

Knowing your core tasks also helps you identify the critical tasks inside a project. For example, are a number of people I follow on YouTube. Some of them create fantastically produced videos. Thomas Frank and Matt D’Avella, for example. They tell their story in cinematic glory and have millions of people following them. Now for them, their goal is clearly to produce near-perfect videos. It is something they have identified as being important. I admire them for the work they put into their videos. 

For me, my goal is to educate. That is my critical, overall objective. My videos do not come close to the quality of the videos Matt and Thomas produce. I put out three videos per week. Matt and Thomas put out one video every seven to ten days. 

The number of videos you put out each week is not important, but it does go towards demonstrating where your objectives are. Matt and Thomas’s goal is to produce beautifully created videos that both entertain and educate. And they achieve that with tremendous success—just look at their subscriber count. My goal is to educate as many people as I can in using Todoist, Evernote, Apple’s productivity apps and time management in general. Doing that with beautifully crafted films is not a priority for me. 

So establishing what the core tasks that will drive you towards achieving the goal of your project or goal is an important first step. Without knowing what the core tasks are that will drive you towards achieving completion of a project or the achievement of a goal you will end up making little to no progress. 

So how do core tasks differ from areas of focus?

Areas of focus are tasks that support your core tasks. To demonstrate this, let’s go back to the body-building example. The core tasks are lifting weights and eating the right food. To support that you still need a training programme. You still need to list out the foods you will buy from the supermarket and you will still need to schedule your gym time. Al these are areas of focus. On their own, they will not help you achieve your goal of being a champion bodybuilder, yet they are still important because without them it will be difficult to do the right weight training and eat the right food. 

Developing a course. While the overall core tasks are related to the educational content, supporting that content is the video editing. If the editing was not done, then the content would be disjointed and distracting from the educational content. So, to create an online course, the core work is developing the slides to explain the points, recording the videos and uploading them to my learning centre. The areas of focus are editing the videos and marketing the course. 

To give you a business use case image you have been asked to do a presentation in ten days time. To create a presentation you need a number of tasks. Things like creating the slides, get the information, decide on the theme, decide how you will develop your story, what clothes you will wear etc. 

Many of those tasks are not important. The theme, the typeface you will use etc while having an impact if you have no content to put in your slides it does not matter how beautiful the colour scheme is. The core task is to create the slide deck. Without that everything else is irrelevant. Once you have your slide deck with the information you want to share with the audience, then you can focus on the design, the typeface, the colour scheme and the clothes you will wear. 

Another area I find people getting lost in trivialities is when developing a business idea, or starting a YouTube channel or writing a book. 

In these cases, once you have an idea, you need to begin developing it. So the core tasks would be to sit down and begin writing the book. To record your first video, write the first blog post or create your first product. Without any of those things, you will only ever have an idea. 

Yet, I see so many people with these amazing ideas getting caught up with their branding, website design, blog hosting and video recording equipment. None of these is important at all. The problem is while you are researching and deciding on brand image, messaging and website design, none of the core work is getting done. No product is being built, no blog posts are being written and no videos are being produced. Those are your core tasks. Those tasks need to be your priority. 

At some point in the future branding and messaging will become important, but not until you have some content or at the very least a prototype of your product. Then these areas may come important but are very unlikely to ever become a core task. The core task will always be your content. 

Hopefully, this answer will go some way to explaining the difference between areas of focus and your core tasks. Core tasks are critical must-do tasks that produce your work. Keep you in employment and drives everything forward. Areas of focus are the surrounding tasks that, while important, do not necessarily produce the work that ultimately pays your bills and puts food on your table. 

I hope this explainer answers your question, Sonya. Thank you for sending it in and thank you for allowing me to use it in this podcast. 

Thank you also to you for listening. I really appreciate your support and I hope I am helping you to become better organised and more productive. 

It just remains for me now, to wish you all a very very productive week.