The One Guide To Not Waste Time And Focus On Your Top Priorities

Time. Once it passes, it's gone. Forever. You'll never get that second, minute, or year back.

How you spend your time is one of the most essential life lessons.

It's all you've got.

Being the leader of an international organization for over a decade, I've seen them struggle with how they spend their time, professionally and personally.

They spend their time on things that have little value. They get swept away by the daily tasks and spend less time on what truly matters most.

They're stuck in the daily whirlwind.

I recently had this conversation with our CFO, my mother, who is a culprit of this bad habit.

She currently leads all our financial and warehouse distribution activities.

She was arguing with me about why she has to delegate ordering office supplies since she's been doing it for over thirty years.

Office supplies people!

She manages the financial turnover of millions of dollars and oversees thousands of incoming and outgoing shipments a year.

We have some incredible team members whom she can delegate the outcomes of ordering office supplies too.

She isn't the right person.

She's not alone.

We all get stuck on smaller tasks. Giving them more weight than they deserve.

I've been a culprit. On bad days, I still am.

This is how we overcome it.

If you chase two rabbits, both will escape.

What's your North Star?

Your North Star is the guiding vision of your life.

Your business.

Your career.

 It's a long-term vision that you won't achieve any time soon. You'll need to avoid present bias, more on this later.

My personal North Star (mission statement) is to live every day in which I optimize life's potential and maximize my return on time.

Every day I pursue my goals and actions around this mission.

I set time aside daily to work on my mind and body. I dedicate long periods to focus on my most important goals. I make it non-negotiable that I spend deep quality time with my family every day.

The same is true for my businesses. Our North Star is what guides us and helps us make critical decisions.

If you don't have a North Star, start creating one.

This idea can also be powerful to you as an individual. Your incremental progress toward a goal may not be noticeable today. But over a long period of time, many small steps can get you really far if you stay pointed in the right direction.

You can't do everything, so this is what you need to do instead.

We rather focus on the easy than the complex.

We rather entertain the deluge of emails because setting two-hours aside to focus on an important goal requires dedication, focus, and deep thinking.

Parkinson's law of triviality, named after naval historian Cyril Parkinson, which states that organizations tend to give disproportionate weight to trivial issues. Both of these concepts explain how group dynamics can lead the group to focus on the wrong things.

You can't do everything!

All your emails, all the tasks waiting to be accomplished, all the daily requests.

It's impossible.

Sure, you can work 18 hours a day, but theirs a cost, the law of diminishing returns.

What you need to do is ask yourself, what's the one to three things I can do that will make everything else meaningless in comparison? 

The myth about multitasking and how to avoid the two-front war

In past interviews, I've asked candidates if they believe they're good multitaskers.

I know their not.

Often, they'll say yes, thinking that's what I want to hear. But it isn't. When I probe them more, they explain how they can do two things at once really well.

What they don't explain is the cost.

Two-front wars played a major role in World Wars I and II, when Germany twice fought both Russia on its eastern front and Western allies on its western front. Each time, dividing its attention contributed significantly to Germany's eventual defeat.

If you chase two rabbits, both will escape. 

This takes form in multitasking.

There are two types of thinking.

The difference between high concentration vs. low concentration activities

Low-concentration: this is autopilot thinking. Like saying your name, walking, 2+2=4, etc.

High-concentration: this is deliberate thinking. It's everything else that's not autopilot thinking.

You can fully perform only one high-concentration activity at a time. Your brain just isn't capable of simultaneously focusing on two high-concentration activities at once. If you attempt this, you will be forced to context-switch between the two activities.

Context switching isn't immediate. You can perform two activities simultaneously, but something has to give. Either you slow down one of the activities, or you do one, or both poorly.

The negative effects of multitasking (slow or poor performance) are sometimes acceptable if the activities are of low consequence, such as when you fold the laundry while watching T.V. or listen to music while working out at the gym. In contrast, multitasking on activities of any significant consequence will be immediately problematic, or even deadly, as in the case of texting while driving.

All the content switching when that happens during multitasking results in wasted time and effort. 

Sure, this waste is acceptable for low-concentration activities like folding laundry and watching T.V.

You use extra mental overhead to keep track of multiple activities at once. You should avoid multitasking on any consequential activity.

Focusing on ONE high-concentration activity at a time will help you produce better results. It's what Cal Newport calls Deep Work.

Dedicate long interrupted time to make progress on your most important problem, opportunity, or critical drivers.

It's also what Keith Cunningham talks about in "The Road Less Stupid." Setting time to think about your problems and addressing the next best viable steps.

You can't accomplish these things while checking email or answering colleague's questions, who just two happened to walk into your office as you were in a high concentration activity.

Sound familiar?

Protect your focus time.

At Skylink, I've begun to create a culture of protecting people's focus time. We all must get time to focus on our most important priorities.

It's how we'll make progress on our goals, priorities, and critical outcomes.

That's why I've asked everyone on my team to message me if they need something. I wrote about this topic here.

The reason why is I can't focus on what I'm doing and address their concerns at the same time. I'm usually in a high-concentration activity at my desk.

To achieve this, set yourself two 90-minute blocks every day.

The mornings are best for high-concentration activities, and not living inside your email.

Add these time blocks to your calendar and make them non-negotiable. No meetings. No calls. No walk-ins.

Put a sign on your door/cubicle that says airplane mode (I hate closed doors) and turn off all your notifications.

Protect your deep work.

How to decide what to focus your attention on.

One of the most significant issues facing most people is how to determine what's most important. 

There's a simple fix to this. Your quarterly goals get TOP priority. They're the most important.

If it's in your career, these goals will directly impact the critical drivers your role is trying to achieve for the organization.

You established yearly and quarterly goals for a reason.

Any task that you believe helps you achieve the next steps to accomplishing these goals should get priority on your calendar.

They'll outweigh most items on your task list.

Another way to determine what's most important is using the Eisenhower Matrix.

Eisenhower Matrix

U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower famously said, "What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important."

This quote inspired Stephen Covey in 7 Habits of Highly Effective People to create the Eisenhower Decision Matrix, a two-by-two grid (matrix) that helps you prioritize important activities across both your personal and your professional life by categorizing them according to their urgency and importance.

Activities in quadrant I need to get done immediately, but quadrant II activities are just as important. They need to get prioritized right after quadrant I.

Your creative energies need to be focused on quadrant II. This is the quadrant that will get you closer to achieving your goals.

Quadrants III and IV will pull at your attention.

They'll say, look at me, help me, get me done. Most of quadrant III is better delegated, outsourced, or ignored.

Quadrant IV is full of activities to reduce or eliminate altogether.

Protect your quadrant II time.

Now the question is, how do you decide what fits into quadrant 2?

Focus your priorities on high-leverage activities

All priorities are about leverage. Specific activities have higher leverage than others and will produce the most substantial outcomes.

Before you dive into a new activity, you should always take time to identify the high leverage activities.

Thinking in the high-leverage activity term is following the Pareto principle.

It states that in many situations, 80 percent of the results come from approximately 20 percent of the effort. Addressing this 20 percent is, therefore, a high-leverage activity.

One of the best ways to find high-leverage activities is to think of your tasks as levels.

A level activities & projects: The $10,000/hr activities. These are your highest level activities. If you put in one hour of time into these activities, it will produce 200x the value.

B level activities & projects: The $1,000/hr activities. Most of these activities fall within your area of focus and responsibility. If you put in one hour of time in these activities, it will produce 64x the value.

C level activities & projects: The $100/hr activities. You can't avoid these. These are typically management level activities. So if you put in one hour, these tasks will produce 16x the value.

D level activities & projects: The $10/hr activities. These are your D activities. Why are they D? Because you should delete, delegate, defer, or design these tasks out. If you put in one hour of time into these activities, they will only produce 1x the value.

Classifying your activities in this way will help you decide what's truly important.

Get out of your way

Using leverage and focus on what's most important will help you spend time on the right activities.

It's a great start, but now we need to talk about getting them done.

Do you procrastinate?

In a study in the Psychological Bulletin by Piers Steel, a University of Calgary professor, concluded that about 5% of people were chronic procrastinators in 1978 as opposed to about 26% in 2007. 

There are many reasons.

Distraction is a big reason we procrastinate.

It's the present bias.

It's a tendency to overvalue near-term rewards over making little, daily progress on long-term goals.

Sound familiar?

Everyone discounts the future compared with the present at some level. It's human behavior.

We love how it feels to easily answer that email, to check off the simple task from our task list.

The gratification of accomplishing our big goals is in the future. It's delayed gratification.

That's called hyperbolic discounting; people value instant gratification over delayed gratification.

Make commitments to overcome procrastination.

The best way to limit present bias is to make small commitments.

This is the primary reason you should break your quarterly goals down into 5 - 10 action steps, and each week and day having priorities to commit to that helps you make progress on your goals.

Make your commitments public and use an accountability partner to keep you on track.

We do this at my company. We have a weekly meeting, and in it, we quickly talk about last week's priorities and what got done, as well as this week's priorities.

We also say our daily priorities in our regular team standing huddle.

Commitments are a great way to keep yourself accountable. You don't want to look like a lazy asshole in front of others.

Don't be weak, and if you need to…

Take shortcuts.

Don't work harder, work smarter.

Shortcuts are the key to your productivity castle. Especially if the tasks are redundant and reoccurring.

Using shortcuts will help you get through your priorities faster and more efficiently so you can save that mental juice for higher-level activities.

Design systems and processes

The first shortcut to take is designing systems and procedures to do most of the heavy lifting for you.

If it's an activity you or someone else will consistently need to perform, then designing and continuing to update a set of processes that explains how to complete the activity.

This allows a level of consistency, but also saves brainpower. You won't have to recreate or try to remember how you did it last time.

Automate redundant tasks

Next is automation.

The first question I ask when I see specific tasks pop up on my list is, how can I automate this?

A good example is my business dashboards. I've been manually updating them every week, and I find delegating it a waste of my team's time, yes, even for junior-level roles.

I found a system to integrate our systems together into a dashboard.

Delegate

The next logical shortcut is to delegate your tasks. Notice I didn't say abdicate. Hopefully, at some point, you created a procedure for the new delegatee to follow.

The problem with delegation is we often think of it as a waste of time. We say, "I might as well do it myself."

I feel this way 95% of the time.

This problem occurs for a few reasons.

One, delegating will inherently take an upfront time investment. Based on the present bias, we rather think of the time we'll spend today rather than the time we'll save in the future once the person we're delegating to gets up to speed.

Two, we set the other person up for failure. We don't create a procedure to follow. We don't record quick videos demonstrating how something is done. We say, do this with very little instruction.

Three, there are levels of delegation. You first hand off the task. Then you hand off the ownership of the process. Finally, you hand off the ownership of the KPI.

Time is best spent on the things that matter the most. Really understanding this will change every aspect of your life.

Reference:
Weinberg, Gabriel. Super Thinking. Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.