Check your busy-ness meter. And get focused.
With Right Aspiration, we talk about being clear on which lane you want to be in right now with regard to your career—the fast, middle, or slow lane. Checking your busy-ness meter builds on this concept.
Rate yourself in terms of where you are on your work throttle. What are your RPM’s? Are you in the green zone, yellow zone, or red zone? If you’re in the red zone, pay attention and look to optimize how you’re spending your time.
Check yourself and determine if you are putting time against unnecessary should’s vs. what you want given your personal definition of success.
Avoid working long hours simply based on cultural and office work norms, as opposed to focusing your hours on what’s most important and delivering excellence on actions that will truly have the most impact. From a Leadership Brand perspective, what are the areas where you can and need to make the most impact given your role and responsibilities? Explore and focus on how you can be excellent there.
To focus your efforts, ask yourself, “What is critical for me to work on that will have the most impact?”
To do this, create an Impact / Effort 2x2 matrix with Effort on the X-axis and Impact on the Y-axis. Then map your main tasks on the map against those axes.
Then, look for those High Impact / Low Effort and High Impact / High Effort tasks. Prioritize within those—which are most critical to get done first, second, third? Is it worth it to get some High Impact / Low Effort tasks done before you take on the big nuts?
Of the list, determine what tasks are ones only you can do. Which are the ones where you can add the most value?
Or, consider what activities are in your flow zone, ones that you love, that feed your energy, and that you really want to do.
Which ones can you delegate? Look to delegate as many as possible.
For those you won’t delegate, create workplans for the High Impact / High Effort tasks, breaking them down so you can make slow, steady progress.
For the Low Impact tasks, determine which you can eliminate. What can just not be done, because they are creating noise? Which are still necessary, but can be delegated?
Finally, how can you simplify any remaining low impact tasks?
These days it’s just too easy to get busy and have a never ending to do list for work and your personal life.
Put some time and effort into taking the crazy out of busy to get yourself focused on what’s most important.
To complement this, you might also appreciate reading “10 Productivity & Energy Management Tips to Make the Most of Your Time.”
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Sustainable Ambition™ is about crafting a fulfilling career to support your life from decade to decade.
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