How to Focus On What’s Important And Eliminate What’s Not

Last week, I answered a question about how to raise your productivity level, and that sparked a lot of questions about how to reduce the number of tasks you have to do each day. So, this week, I will explain how to do just that.

 

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Episode 181

Hello and welcome to episode 181 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.

Last week, I pointed out that the most productive people—the people operating at a higher level—only ever have four or five tasks on their to-do list each day. The question is how do they manage to do that and get all their work done? That is what I will be answering today. 

Now the starting point, as I explained last week, is you must know what you want. Most people are struggling with managing their work each day because they don’t know what is important to them. And when you don’t know what is really important, everything becomes important and then (bear with me here) nothing is important. 

It’s similar to knowing the root meaning of the word “Priority”. Technically, we cannot have “priorities” because “priority” means one thing. There can only be one priority. You cannot make the word plural. Now about fifty years ago, the pluralisation of the word “priority” started and now most of us use the word “priorities”. But, if you really want to reduce your to-do list you need to treat the word “priority” as it should be treated. What one thing can you do today? 

If you have not sat down and thought about your future, about what you want, how you want to live your life in five, ten and twenty years time, then you will find your task list becomes full of other people’s tasks and very few of your own. You will not be prioritising today what you need to be ready for in the future.

To give you a simple example, when I was a teenager, I got to know a gentleman in his 80s who was a very useful sprinter in his day. As got older he became a prolific marathon runner. Every three months he ran a marathon and he was in his mid-80s. 

I was so inspired by this that I decided I too want to be running marathons when I am in my 80s. 

The question is, how will I be able to do that. If I spend my life eating unhealthy food and sat behind a desk all day being stressed out by every little thing that came my way, I would soon find myself unable to run anywhere. I’d be too fat and too sick. To make sure I can achieve that goal in the future, I must take care of my health and stay fit today. How do I do that? I must be careful of what I eat and exercise frequently. 

And that is what I have done. I exercise at least four times per week, I eat healthily and I make sure I do not spend all day sat down behind a desk. I move…a lot. 

I know what I want to be doing in thirty to forty years time and at least four times each week, I do something that will enable me to do that. 

And that is why it is important you first establish what is important to you. 

Now here’s where you will face difficulties.

For most of us, we spend too much time worrying about the problems and difficulties we face today. We get caught up in the dramas of other people—our colleagues and customers for instance—and we lose sight of our long-term plans. That means you are living your life at a daily level and that is not sustainable. You need to operate on a level that grows and builds your future self. You need to understand that all great things—and life is a great thing—takes time to grow and flourish. 

I work with a group of middle managers here in Korea who have dedicated their working lives to their companies. They are all now fast approaching the time where they need to think about their futures and they have nothing except a small amount of savings. They have no plans, and no compelling future and they are scared. 

Their problem is they have dedicated the last twenty to thirty years of their lives serving a company that has its own goals and plans and those goals and plans are not going to include them in five years time. They have spent no time on their own future plans, largely because for most of those years they have been working, the future was tomorrow and the problems they will face at work tomorrow. 

That’s why it’s important you make sure you have an exciting and compelling future designed for yourself now. You will never be able to operate at a higher level if all you are doing is adding tasks to your to-do list that benefit others and the things you feel you have to do today and not your long term future plans.

Okay, enough of the background. Hopefully, you get that now. Let’s imagine you do have a compelling future planned out for yourself. How do you reduce the number of tasks on your to-do list?

The first thing is to automate as much as you can. Now when I use the word “automate” here I do not necessarily mean use technology. For instance, every Friday I record my YouTube videos. To set up the “studio”, I have to move some furniture around. So, once I finish recording and before I put the furniture back, I always vacuum my office and shake out the rugs. It’s a ten-minute job, and it just makes sense to add that ten minutes to my recording time and clean things up before I move everything back. 

I don’t need a task that says “clean office” because it will always happen when I record my videos. You could easily make cleaning up your home office for instance by including cleaning in your weekly planning session. 

Similarly, you can use natural triggers. Natural triggers are those things you can see with your own eyes that something needs doing. Doing the laundry can be done when you see that the laundry basket is full, doing the dishes can be done as part of your eating ritual—you wash up immediately after you finish eating. Just like you know when your car needs fuel because the fuel warning light comes on. I actually take this one a little further, when I see that I only have half a tank left, I will fill up the car. 

Triggers are like when you go to bed you always put your phone on charge, so the trigger is going to bed, you automatically put your phone on charge ready for the next morning

When there is a natural trigger you do not need to make it a task on your task list. 

Paying bills, usually need to be done on the same day each month, so reminders for your bills would be on your calendar as an all-day event. This also has the advantage that when you do the weekly planning session you will see it in your calendar. Hopefully, you are also reviewing your calendar as part of your daily mini-planning session so you are not going to miss anything. 

However, where possible you want to be setting bill payments up as direct debits or standing orders—these are where payments are automatically paid on a given date. 

My car payments, credit card bills and Apple Music subscriptions are paid automatically for instance. I don’t need a task for these. 

Now in your work, you must know what you are paid to do. Too often we allow ourselves to be involved in things that we are not paid to do. If you have done the Time Sector course, you will know all about your core work. The work that you are paid to do, the quality of which will determine whether you get that promotion you have always desired. 

When I was working in car sales many years ago, I was employed to sell cars. My salary was dependant on the number of cars I sold each month. 

Yet, for some reason I allowed myself to be sent out by my sales manager to clean the cars outside the showroom and make sure there were enough brochures in the brochure stands. I was not paid to do any of those things, but I did them because my boss asked me to do it.

My colleague, Claire, was a lot smarter than I. She knew, like me, she was paid based on the number of cars she sold. Whenever there was a car cleaning or aligning to be done, Claire was always missing. She was either on the phone following up with a customer or talking to a customer in the showroom. 

Needless to say, Claire always sold more cars than me. When I pointed out to my boss that she did no cleaning or aligning or brochure refilling he said: “I don’t F’ing care. She sells cars!”—lesson learned. I quickly learned to prioritise selling over being ‘helpful’. 

Being “helpful” may have helped me to be popular, but it did nothing for the quality of the roof over my head or food on my table or my long term goals. It helped Claire and my boss, but it did nothing for me. 

Claire did not have “clean cars out the front” or “check to see there are enough brochures” on her to-do list. She had tasks that helped her to achieve her sales goals each month. She was terrible at admin, and the admin department did not particularly like her for that. Did she care? Of course not. She was not paid to have meticulously filled out documents and notes. She was paid to sell and selling cars gave her the salary she wanted to live the lifestyle she wanted. Being great at admin did not do that. 

Now a lot of you forward actionable emails to your to-do list. Why? Nine times out of ten emails are requests for information that benefit the sender and not you. All they do is suck up more of your time and cause you to spend time on other people’s priorities. 

Now, I am not suggesting you ignore emails, but you need to get very clear about important emails and exclude non-important ones. And you should not be sending these to your to-do list. 

Instead, create a Folder in your email called “Action This Day” and dedicate a certain amount of time each day for clearing as many of these as possible. If you reverse the order these emails show up in your folder so the oldest is at the top, you will always be on top of your email. 

I dedicate 5 pm to 6 pm for communications. That hour each day is for responding to my mail and messages. Once 6 pm comes I stop. Doing this every day means I am usually no more than 24 hours away from responding to my mail. 

Essentially, what I am doing is “chunking” responding to messages and emails to one block of time each day. This way, for the majority of the day I can remain focused on my important work knowing I have time each day to keep on top of my actionable email.

And don’t fall into the trap of believing emails will carry “urgent” requests. Nobody uses email today for anything urgent. So stop treating email as urgent. It is not. If something was genuinely urgent you would receive a phone call or text message. 

If you do respond to email quickly, you are setting an unrealistic expectation. Stop doing this and train your bosses, colleagues and clients to communicate genuine urgent matters in a more direct way.

If you need to be reminded of certain routine admin tasks then group all these tasks together into a dedicated “Routines” folder in your task manager. I have these pop up at the end of the day. The way I do that is to make sure any routines—tasks that do not move my projects or goals forward—are at the bottom of my to-do list. 

Routines just need to be done and it rarely is a problem if I cannot do them on the desired day. As long as I have my important tasks at the top of my list, if I have time at the end of the day I can complete my routines, although you should try to find a trigger for your routines as much as you can so they do not need to be put into your task manager. 

Finally, create morning and evening routines and keep these lists out of your to-do list for the day. I find after a few weeks these routines need no reminder. For instance, when I wake up, I put the kettle on, get my lemon water from the fridge and drink that while I wait for the kettle to boil. 

I then make my coffee and as I wait for my coffee to brew, I do a series of shoulder stretching exercises. Once my coffee is made, I write my journal and drink my coffee and then process my email. 

I don’t need any of these tasks on my to-do list because they are automatic. I have been following the same morning routine for three or four years now. 

Likewise, I have a closing down routine that includes reviewing my task list and planning tomorrow. Again, none of these needs to be on my to-do list because they are automatic. 

To reduce the number of tasks on your to-do list you need to be thinking in terms of elimination. It’s about removing unnecessary tasks, grouping things together and dedicating a small amount of time to do them in one go and being very protective of your time. 

But, all these are just tactics. The most important thing you can do is to identify what your core work is and being crystal clear about what it is you want out of life and pursuing tasks, goals and projects that will take you there and eliminating anything that does not serve that higher purpose.

I hope these strategies help you reduce the number of tasks you have in your task manager and helps to focus your mind on what is important to you.

Thank you to all of you who gave me feedback on last week’s episode and also to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.