04/10/2021
8 Habits To Boost Productivity:
Habit 1: Ruthlessly cut away the unimportant (and Focus on the important)
The 1st habit of productive people is to slice and dice everything that’s unimportant.
When you go to your work desk, write down a list of things to do for the day. Then evaluate which are the most important things out of the list, first circling them, then ranking the items. Then challenge these items to see if they’re the best use of my time. What impact does doing these make? Can I be doing more high-value tasks? Doing so helps me ensure I’m working on the absolute most important things for the day.
Then, for the non-important ones, either push them to a later date or find a way to take them off the list. (Learning how to say no to others is very important here.)
For everything you’re doing now, ask yourself how important this is. Does this bring you dramatically closer to your dreams? Does this create any real impact in your life in the long term? Is it the absolute best way to spend your time or can you be doing more high value tasks?
If the answer is ‘yes’ to all the questions, keep this task. If not, perhaps it’s time to ditch it. No point doing something unimportant! Say you’re handling a project that makes no difference to your business after it’s completed. It wouldn’t matter whether you take an hour, three hours, or one week to do it—it’d still make no difference at the end of the day!
It’s part of knowing what your purpose or end objective is and doing things that serve this purpose and this objective.
Many people tend to wrongly classify regular tasks as high value tasks. A good tool to set them apart is Stephen Covey's Time Management Matrix that classifies our daily activities into 4 different quadrants. The best way to say it, PUT FIRST THINGS FIRST!
Going by the questions raised above, my most important tasks are the ones that bring you closest to your purpose and dreams when you do them. However it doesn’t end with correctly identifying the high value tasks. Often times, we’ll be imbued with a stream of random, miscellaneous requests throughout the day. We're used to giving immediate attention to these things. Say random request # 1 comes in and I’ll do it immediately since it takes just 5-10 minutes, max. This is the same for random request # 2, #3…. all the way to #20. After a while, you realize these things take a lot of our time and we don’t even get any meaningful result out of them. Not only that, we never finish my high value tasks. We may think we're being very productive when we finish the random things, but truth is it’s just fake productivity.
So I suggest you use a separate “do later” list for these less urgent tasks. Dump all the incoming tasks here and work on your high-value tasks. Then, at the end of the day, allocate a time slot to clear these tasks. Batch the similar urgent tasks, then clear them at one go. You should be able to get them cleared in an hour or less, compared to the few hours I’d have taken if I attended to them randomly through the day.
