Have You Been
Wasting Your Time Wrongly?
Do you find yourself being busy all
day with endless to-do’s? Are you constantly stretched for time?
If yes, it’s possible that you’re not making the best use of
your time. It’s likely that you have too many distractions that have been
masked as ‘tasks’. And it’s these tasks that are eating away your time and
energy.
For example, do you believe you are being super-productive when
you’re checking your emails or sitting in meetings? You might think so, but at
the end of the day – how much have you really accomplished?
Fortunately, as you’ll see shortly, it’s possible to eliminate
(or at the very least shrink) the unimportant stuff so that you can make space
for the tasks that have real impact and bring about tremendous results.
However, before we get to that, let’s take a brief look at what happens when we
allocate too much time to low-impact tasks.
Procrastination,
Parkinson’s Law and More
Procrastination
The Oxford Dictionary describes procrastination as: “The action
of delaying or postponing something.” Clearly, it’s not a trait that successful
people are associated with.
Now, to be fair, from time-to-time we’re all guilty of
procrastination. It really only becomes an issue when procrastination starts to
be our default way of working. I’m sure you’ve had colleagues like that.
Whatever the task or project that they’re supposed to be working on – they
constantly find reasons and excuses for failing to get started.
You may not be one of those people, but…
I bet you don’t feel that you’re procrastinating when you’re
working on low-impact or low-return tasks like checking emails. I know this,
because I used to be like that too! I distinctively remember feeling productive
when I was working on these type of tasks – even though they never led me to
accomplish anything worthwhile.
It took me years to realize this, but focusing time and energy
on low-impact, unimportant tasks is a form of procrastination. This is because
– if we’re honest with ourselves – it’s easier to work on the maintenance stuff
rather than tackling the bigger more important tasks and assignments.
Parkinson’s law
Parkinson’s law states that your work expands to fit the amount
of time you have available for it. In my previous working life, I found this
law to be especially true with tasks that were low-impact.
Why so?
Well, your limbic system (nerves and networks within the brain
that control drives and emotions) puts up such a fight against working on your
more challenging, highest-return tasks, that the low-impact tasks that support
your work almost serve as work ‘crack’ or work candy. In other words, you feel
productive when you work on them. This is understandable, as you’re most likely
super-busy. But, as I stated earlier – being constantly busy on low-impact
tasks means you’ll fail to accomplish anything of note.
There is no
order
It’s Monday morning, you’re feeling tired, and you’ve just
arrived at your office. You grab a strong coffee, go to your desk, log in to
your computer and start working. However, you immediately fall into the common
productivity trap that stops people from achieving their goals – namely, you
fail to allocate any time for prioritizing or planning. Because of this, you’ll
probably end up working on a whole list of unimportant tasks before reaching
any genuinely important tasks.
For instance, how many times first thing in a morning do you
find yourself just catching up with emails (and gossip from your colleagues)?
The answer is probably – a lot! It may seem like a way to warm up before the
real work, but in most cases, you’ll simply find that you lose an hour or more
without really achieving anything. You may even find that by the time you’ve
caught up with emails and gossip, that you’ve been called off to a meeting. And
by the time the meeting finishes – you’ve probably already missed the deadline
for completing a project.
Company culture
and the dreaded meetings
I don’t know about you, but previous places I’ve worked have led
me to realize that: People love setting up meetings to discuss, to present, to
find solutions, etc.
But in many cases, these meetings may not be the best use of
yours or other people’s time.
Although some meetings are important, the average employee
wastes an incredible amount of time in them: 37 percent of the average office
worker’s time is spent in meetings. (A shocking statistic!)
Furthermore, a survey of 150 senior executives found that they
think 28 percent of meetings are an unnecessary waste of time. (I’d argue that
number is north of 50 percent for the majority of employees, because senior
executives aren’t invited to the most pointless meetings!)
Unproductive meetings are the opposite of high-return tasks like
working on projects. These meetings use up a ton of your time, but have
virtually no positive effects on your work output.
Consequences
Everything in life has consequences. And this includes how you
approach your work.
If you spend a lot of time working on unnecessary tasks – then
you won’t see great results. In fact, your productivity is likely to be
stagnant at best. Of course, the reason for this is obvious: you’re not
producing your finest work because your time has been eaten up trying to finish
those endless low-return tasks. Here’s the sad part about this. You may find
yourself falling behind the rest of the pack (e.g., your peers, your
colleagues) because your performance is increasingly below par.
So, what can you do to address this issue?
My Take on This
Having
previously been a low-impact tasks addict, I now feel confident in being able
to help you out of this hole.
Firstly, whatever your job, there will be low-impact tasks that
you can eliminate.
That’s right. Every single support or maintenance task in your
work can be either shrunk, delegated, or even – in a few cases – eliminated
entirely. After you have gotten a better grip on how much time and attention
you spend on these tasks, you’ll open up opportunities to work on what I like
to call… the real stuff!
From my experience, here are some of the low-impact tasks that
you’ll be able to shrink or eliminate:
1. Recurring,
low-return meetings.
2. Low-return
phone calls, and the productivity porn of social media and news websites and
other time wasters.
3. Tasks and
projects that make little use of your time, unique talents or skills.
4. Tasks and
projects in which you contribute negligible value – but which suck up an
abundance of your time.
Take email, for example.
In Chris Bailey’s The Productivity Project, he
conducted an informal survey, where he asked several friends, to keep a tally
of how often they checked for new email messages at work every day for a week.
The average between them? An astonishing 41 times!
Another (and this time, more scientific) study found that most
people check their email about every 15 minutes – which adds up to 32 times
over an 8-hour day.
When you check for new email 32 times a day, that’s 32 times
your attention is derailed from what you’re supposed to be working on. It’s pretty
hard to maintain any mental clarity in those conditions. Email may be a vital
support task, but you also shouldn’t be checking it 32 times a day.
Here’s How to
Get Your Productivity Back on Track
Keep note
The simple act of keeping a time log makes you more aware of
what you’re working on daily. But time is only one part of the story.
Low-return tasks also take up a boatload of your attention.
After you identify these low-return tasks, think about how
frequently you focus on them throughout the day, by keeping a formal tally for
a day or two.
List them in order of how much time and attention they consume.
For example: replying to emails, attending meetings, paperwork, managing your
calendar, etc.
Chances are that you have maintenance-type tasks like these that
support your real work – pretty much every office worker on the planet is
inundated with email and gets invited to too many meetings and events. But, as
I highlighted earlier, it’s possible to shrink, delegate or even eliminate
those support tasks. You can do it – and you definitely should!
I find the most effective answer to shrinking low-return support
tasks is to become aware of how much time and attention you spend on these
tasks – and then literally shrink them by setting limits.
Some support tasks in your work take up a disproportionate
amount of your attention rather than your time. For instance, most emails only
take a minute or two to respond to, but when you check your email dozens of
times a day, those are countless times you’ve had to transition from focusing
on something important to focusing on email.
The switching costs associated with multitasking can be
enormous. (And not in a good way!)
Of course, there’s also the uncertainty that comes with not
knowing whether you have new messages – which impacts your attention. And then
there are the frequent email alerts that interrupt you when you’re actually
trying to work on something more productive.
For tasks like email, the best way I’ve found to shrink their
impact on time and productivity is to limit how often I focus on them
throughout the day. I turn off my email alerts, and only check emails at a few
specific times: in the morning, before lunch, and at the end of the day.
The same goes for meetings.
Don’t just accept every meeting invite you receive. Instead,
limit the number of meetings you attend a week. Not only will you free up time
to get on with your real work – but going forward, you’ll also discourage
colleagues from inviting you to unnecessary meetings.
Over to You
So, please don’t
let low-return tasks drag your productivity levels to hell. Start each working
day, week and month with a plan. Know the things you want to achieve – and by
shrinking and eliminating time wasting activities – go ahead and achieve them!
I promise you, you’ll be amazed at the uptick in your
productivity when you put your focus on the big stuff. Your boss and colleagues
will look at you with new eyes. They’ll wonder how you now manage to accomplish
so much – with seemingly, so little time. One thing’s for sure. Your new
super-productive work life will in time pay you handsome dividends. These could
come in the form of increased job satisfaction, pay rises and even promotions.
As the saying goes… the world is your oyster!
Leon Ho
Leon Ho is the Founder and CEO of Lifehack
http://www.lifehack.org/645282/shrinking-the-unimportant?ref=mail&mtype=daily_newsletter_v2&mid=20171214&uid=687414&hash=707e797f7e757e6d794c856d747b7b3a6f7b79&utm_source=daily_newsletter_v2&utm_medium=email&action=click&user_type=member&sub_time=792
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