Is everything your fault?
No, probably not. But your relationship with your struggles, and how you approach discomfort, both weigh heavily on your chance to proactively resolve things.
After two decades in and around leadership, I’ve coached and developed people at all levels of numerous industries. Here are the common ways I see people getting in the way of their own productivity.
You focus on the busy-ness, not your business
If you fixate on how busy you are, that becomes the central thing to focus on. But if you fixate instead on finding time to do the important stuff first, the rest will fall into place.
When I got into management, people loved telling me the anecdote about the jar and the rocks. You know the one: don’t put the small tasks into your schedule first. Make sure you plan your day around the important things and slowly add other things in.
But it demonstrates a powerful productivity lesson: You don’t find time. You make it. If you don’t choose how to spend your time, the universe will.
In his book Deep Work, Cal Newport points out that in our modern economy based on knowledge work, we’re still leaning on industrial era measures of productivity. Because on the factory floor, this equation made sense. But in today’s world we’re still reaching for this as a way of hotwiring validation, and a feeling we’re doing a good job. Because it’s a simple metric. More work, more done.
But say yes to too many other things and you’re diluting your output and spreading yourself too thin. Then your performance starts to drop on the very things that got you to where you are.
Don’t mistake what’s urgent for what’s important. Focus on your priorities, and give them your full, undivided attention.
Speaking of priorities…
You’ve got too many priorities
The essence of a priority is that it’s the most important thing. So it isn’t really possible to have more than one.
“When everything is a priority, nothing is a priority” — Karen Martin
There are a bunch of ways to solve this that the internet does a much better job of explaining that me. The Ivy Lee method. Eat the Frog. Big Red Pen. The CEO checklist.
Me? I have a list of three goals and these have to be done before I can do anything else. Then I have a second list, my ‘ongoing list’, and I pick something from there.
Don’t overcomplicate it. Try a few systems and see which one calls to you.
You’re working hard, but not smart
What animal best represents the spirit of how you work?
I used to work with a guy who was a hamster. How, you may ask? By doing something we politely called ‘hamster wheeling’. He’d be running around looking stressed and red-faced, but achieving little.
It didn’t help that he had chubby cheeks and ate everything with two hands.
Sometimes taking a few minutes to consider a plan and approach can pay off. Know where you want to end up. Make every action count.
I worked at a bar during university. Every time we went to the big fridge to grab some fruit, the head bartender would shout ‘no wasted journeys’. What he meant was don’t just run back and forth for each thing you need. Plan your trips. If your ice is getting low, grab that too. Or grab a crate too and top up the bottles in your fridge. The point is to make each journey as efficient as possible, so you’ll save the total trips.
Nowadays as a manager I try to batch tasks. I don’t let emails pop up throughout the day and pull me out of what I’m doing. I schedule specific time to check them.
I used to get really frustrated with an endless to do list, until I stopped letting anything that would take me less than two minutes get written down. I either did it, or let it go. The change was profound (embarrassingly so).
The trick is to be proactive, not reactive.
You fix problems, not systems
When something goes wrong or sucks time away from you, you focus on fixing that specific situation rather than looking at the root cause and fixing that instead.
What you end up with is getting sucked into situations to try to diagnose and rectify what’s gone wrong on the surface level. This might give you some short-term success, but it’s not going to change your life. And chances are, similar things are going to keep happening.
The trick is to get to the bottom of why. This can be painful. It can mean admitting things about ourselves and our approach that don’t work. Things that might not make us look or feel good.
But it’s better to be looking at it than looking for it. Because you can’t fix what you don’t think is broken.
So tuck in that bottom lip and dry those eyes. There’s work to do.
Figuring out a root cause gives you the maximal chance at effective resolution.
You want to minimise repetition of issues by dialling in on the key causes. Do you need to shift your perspective? Are you fixating on the wrong goals? Are you forgetting common variables?
…
Conclusion
You have the power to be your own worst enemy.
Plan for and overcome the common areas for this, and give yourself the gift of unlocking your best self.
Give yourself the gift of a solid ally and have your own back. You can’t control everything, but you can control how you approach problems in your life.
Start by:
- Focusing on being productive, not busy
- Prioritising specific daily goals and be brutal with focusing on them
- Working smart, not just harder
- Fixing root causes, not just specific case-by-case issues
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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The post 4 Common Ways You Stop Yourself Getting the Important Stuff Done appeared first on The Good Men Project.