Most people find that once you categorize the activities, it helps to rewrite them on a fresh sheet of paper into ordered columns of Things Only I Can Do (starred), Things Someone Else Can Do, and Things I Should Stop Doing. Once you’re done categorizing them, it’s now time to look back at the first sheet.
The first thing to do here is to look for where items on your Big Wins list also appear on your Activities list. The items that appear as Big Wins AND appear on the Activities List as “Things Only You Can Do” are your Best 20% Activities. Let’s now order all the items on the Activities list to see where they fall in terms of your priorities.
• First Priority: Big Wins + Things Only You Can Do—These are your Best 20% activities and are key activities you need to prioritize in your life!
• Second Priority: Big Wins + Things Someone Else Can Do—These are important activities you need to keep doing, but they are things you need to delegate to someone else to do. Whether that means hiring a part-time assistant or mother’s helper a few hours a week, or working to delegate better at work, you need to work hard to protect your time to not personally take on these activities.
• Third Priority: Things Only You Can Do—Evaluate carefully the activities here, because they are not on your list of Big Wins. Some, you will see, you may need to continue. Some, you do not. Challenge yourself to also think broadly about what this means.
• Not a Priority: Things You Should Stop Doing—Try to stop doing these activities as much as possible.
Let’s look more in-depth into each priority category.
First Priority: Big Wins + Things Only You Can Do
First and foremost, you need to make sure to think hard about these first-priority items—after all, they will get top billing. If you put on your ACTIVITIES list that speaking at conferences is something that only you can do, you then need to 100 percent ensure that speaking at conferences is actually a Big Win for you, and that it’s not just on the Big Wins list because it sounds impressive or others would be eager to do it.
Additionally, it’s also important to think about what steps really contribute to your big wins. If speaking at conferences on the surface doesn’t seem like a Big Win in and of itself (say, you aren’t getting paid enough for it to make a big difference in your household income, or it’s very tiring), then how important is it to helping you get clients, for example? If it’s only somewhat important, is there another way you can achieve the same result with less time invested?
Second Priority: Big Wins + Things Someone Else Can Do
Some of the activities on your list are not things that only you can do, but are activities that directly contribute to your big wins. For example, a blogger might find that posting regularly on social media is important to driving traffic to her website, but in reality those posts aren’t personal posts and thus don’t need to be done by the blogger herself.
When this is the case, the most important thing you can do is delegate this activity out to someone else. Finding help is absolutely critical to ensuring you do your best work. If you work in a larger organization and don’t have the ability or authority to get an extra set of hands, then the key for you is to make sure that you aren’t taking on tasks or activities that are really the role of someone else. If you do work for yourself and have the autonomy to hire help or have money in your family budget to help out your family at home, start to understand that the investment you make in hiring someone to do these activities will pay itself back in the time you earn to do your best work (which will, ultimately, earn you more time and happiness).
Third Priority: Things Only You Can Do
This category is full of some important things that we need to do every day (sleep, eat, groom, go to the dentist) that you might not think contribute to your Big Wins, and many, many things that regularly drain our time. Some people, for example, are quick to say that only they can manage their calendar, book their flights, clean the house, make the dinners, cut the grass, or drive the carpool, but if they think really broadly, they might see they could hire someone to help.
Additionally, if you put on your list that attending meetings is something that only you can do, you’re likely right—most of the time. Additionally (and unfortunately!), most meetings do not directly contribute to great results and 99.9 percent will not appear on your list of Big Wins. In this case, the best you can do is limit your involvement to the greatest extent possible.
Not a Priority: Things You Should Stop Doing
Many of us have things we know we “shouldn’t be doing.” This is your chance to get rid of those activities, once and for all.
Additionally, though, it is essential in this category to not cut out all your meaningless activities. The #1 thing people forget to put on their Big Wins list is relaxing or rest. The reality is that we all need downtime desperately in order to be truly productive—and I believe that it is only when we are truly rested (and I don’t just mean sleep) that our bodies naturally upswing into productivity. If this isn’t a reason to rest, I don’t know what is.
You absolutely need to keep some of your fun, non-productive activities on that list. No, you don’t need to watch the American average of five hours of TV each day.3 (And if you do now, you should absolutely make some of that time “Not a Priority: Stop Doing,” but yes, you may be someone who enjoys and benefits from watching a good movie on the weekends to relax.)
Ultimately, this activity is a mind-opening way to see where your time and work is really moving the needle, and where you’re just running on the hamster wheel to stay busy.
SAY NO
Saying NO is one of the hardest things many of us have to do on a regular basis. Unfortunately, it’s also one of the best, and it’s absolutely critical if we are trying to limit ourselves to our Best 20% that we learn how to say no, and do so frequently. As Lysa Terkeurst says in The Best Yes, “Whenever you say yes to something, there is less of you for something else. Make sure your yes is worth the less.”
It’s true. A chain of no responses paves the way for powerful yeses, and ultimate success.
“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”
—Parkinson’s Law
Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek, became famous for telling us that we could only work four hours a week and still succeed. And although his book’s title isn’t exactly literal, the overarching concept is true: we can absolutely work less and win. In fact, as I believe, working less is a key way to succeed. Tim believes combining two distinct concepts is essential to working less. Specifically, the 80/20 Principle (that we spend 20% of our time to do our best 80%) and Parkinson’s Law (that work expands to fill the time we have to complete it).
And Tim Ferriss is hardly the only one who thinks this works. Author and international development consultant William Powers says that by layering these two concepts over one another he was able to take his five-day workweek down to two days. Alongside the other tools in the Do Less Method, this is how I do my work and read and sleep more than most people I know.
Let’s explore the specifics of editing the time you spend on your work.
TRACK YOUR TIME
To edit down the time you spend on work, you first need to know how much time you’re spending on the things you do. This is an important exercise, and there are a few good ways to do this:
A Notebook or Excel Spreadsheet
Time experts like Laura Vanderkam might say that there’s nothing better than a good old grid for a true time diary (whether in an Excel spreadsheet or on graph paper). The concept is simple: divide the day into twenty-four hours. Spend a week or a month noting what you do during the course of a twenty-four-hour period and add up the results to understand where you spend your time.
That said, there are also some online tools I swear by to step in and smooth out the process.
Rescue Time
RescueTime is a program that automatically tracks all the time you spend on the computer, gi
ving you a report at the end of the week (or day) showing exactly what you were doing every minute of every day that your computer was on. It can also track any off-screen time you manually input. It also has functionality to help you hit and reach productivity goals—like helping remind you not to spend more than 40 percent of your workweek in your email inbox.4
Moment
Remember that your digital work time doesn’t just happen on your computer, and that you likely spend far more time on your mobile device each day than you think. Moment is a great app that tracks how much time that really is. It doesn’t break it down into categories like Rescue Time, but it does tell you how many minutes you’ve been on your phone each day, and can also help remind you to stay off it if you go over your prescribed goals.
More than just knowing where you are spending your time, many tools can help you track some of the overarching goals you’ve set for yourself. Here are a few:
An Activity-Tracking Device
There are a number of different wearable devices on the market, and I’ve tried a few. Whatever tool you use, though, the idea is to track sleep, exercise, steps taken, and potentially heart rate to get a better sense of your overall health metrics, and to work toward bettering yourself. These tools will provide data that will not only give a detailed picture of how you spend your time, but will also help you stay on track to hit any health goals.
Coach.me (or another Habit-Tracking App)
Although the Coach.me app can be used to help show how you spend your days, it is most helpful as a way to track the goals you’re checking off on a daily basis. Meaning that it works best for regular goals—so not “go on two solo vacations with my spouse this year,” but rather, “eat fish three times this week,” or “get a massage twice a month.” I have a few of my goals set up and every time I do one of my goals, I check in and it adds up over time. You can also see who else in the world hit the same goal that day as well.
Ultimately, the idea is not only to track how you spend your days, but also to understand how long it takes you to do those regular activities that make up your Best 20%. If you’re a writer, say, knowing how long it takes to write a blog post, or approximately how long it will take you to write a magazine article or book, is really important information. The same goes for anything in your work life. Over time, this will give you key information.
REDUCE THE TIME YOU SPEND ON YOUR WORK
The biggest misconception people have about working less is that you’ll get less done. In reality, if you made yourself work twenty hours this week instead of forty, you would likely adjust quickly to identifying what is important, and to only doing those things. This is the premise behind the concept of editing down the time you spend at work.
Once you’ve tracked your time for a few weeks and know where you are spending your time, you are ready to tackle the task of editing down the time you’re spending on your work. By doing this after you have started the process of trying to only do your Best 20% work, you should be able to fluidly start seeing some early results.
Here are some key ways to start seeing progress in working fewer hours:
Keep Strict Work Hours
I wasn’t the only one in Silicon Valley who breathed a sigh of relief when Sheryl Sandberg went public saying she always leaves the office at 5:30 p.m. every day.5 Keeping strict office hours, even in a Silicon Valley company where the doors can be open 24/7, is a key strategy for those in an office environment to consider, and I highly recommend working toward achieving this. From my years in Silicon Valley I know firsthand how hard it is to deal with the expectations of other team members who are happy to sit in their seats working (unproductively) for fourteen hours at a stretch, but remember that your health and sanity may depend on it.
In my case, I knew I regularly slept several hours longer than most of my colleagues, so working more than ten hours in my Silicon Valley office on top of commute time simply was not an option in order for me to get the sleep I needed. As a result, I was intentional about working more productively. Ultimately, if you work in an environment where clear business hours are not expected, it is important to create your own boundaries.
In graduate school, for example, I had a professor who set an auto-responder that explained when her working hours were, and when they weren’t. If you emailed at the wrong time of day or night, you simply could not expect a response until her next window of time opened up. She claimed that this single act alone had saved her sanity and she felt free from expectations to work outside of these hours, because she simply told people she would not be available.
Jessica Turner, author of The Fringe Hours, has a full-time job in marketing but also has a host of other interests and hobbies. In order to pursue her passions, she learned years ago it was essential she use her “fringe hours” outside of work and family time wisely. And she did. As her husband says, she can get more done from five to nine in the morning than most people do between nine and five!
For those who work for themselves, keeping strict work hours is an essential step that is often overlooked. Crystal Paine, author of Say Goodbye to Survival Mode, works hard to ensure her computer is turned off by 6 p.m. at night—no matter what. For a work-at-home entrepreneur like Paine, this is more important than ever, since working for yourself tends to blur the barriers between work and everything else. This is especially important when you love your work. Author and blogger Ruth Soukup fervently loves her work—and says happily that she would be fine working seven days a week. That said, this year she promised her husband she would take every Sunday off. I bet it will be one of the best things she does for her productivity.
Go on a Work Diet
In New Slow City, author and consultant William Powers commits to trying to work only two days a week for a year. It’s a radical experiment, and one that pays off in spades. Week after week, he finds that he’s able to get done what could take five days in just two, squeezing forty hours of unproductive work into sixteen hours of true productivity. When, midway through his year, he adds to his schedule by accepting a professorship, he experiences the challenges of balancing the goal to work less with new, outside expectations for longer, sometimes unproductive hours. Ultimately, though, he is able to succeed at working less than five days a week by remembering all he learned when taking time into his own hands.
I have tried many of my own experiments with this over the years, while both employed by organizations and when working for myself. Some of those include: not working more than twenty hours a week (highly effective when I was self-employed); doing three months’ worth of writing projects in one solo weekend (very effective); only working five hours a week on an extended vacation and seeing if I could stay head above water (mostly, but hard); testing how two days offline over the weekend changes my Monday efficiency (it vastly improves it); and testing how a twelve-day period offline changes my productivity upon return (another great improvement).
Ultimately only you can decide what is right in your situation. The goal is to challenge yourself to place strict boundaries around your work responsibilities, and try to drastically reduce the time that you actually spend on them. Experiment to see what you can do in your own life to reach this aim.
Find an Organization That Cares about Results
Finding an organization that embraces a Results-Only-Work-Environment (ROWE),6 where employees are evaluated on performance, not presence; asking to spend more time working remotely (where you can save hours a day on commuting and office socializing); or trying to make a long-term switch to working for yourself are also key thoughts to pursue.
If these bold ideas aren’t realistic short-term options and you are employed with an organization that isn’t helpful in your attempts to more productively manage your time, try to see if you can make any headway encouraging change from within. It’s hard to convince a whole organization to follow suit in editing down the hours worked, but it is possible. I have friends who work for a publishing house in Michigan th
at has a “summer hours” policy. In the summer, employees come in earlier, leave earlier, and take off half of Friday to go home and be with their families. I loved this idea, and when I asked why they did it, they looked at me blankly. “It’s summer in Michigan!” they said. “We only get this weather for a few months a year—and we need to enjoy it.” To them, it was obvious. To me, it was revolutionary. By enjoying their summer, they’ll surely be more rejuvenated and work better all year long.
HACK YOUR MORNING
The power of creating a positive morning routine that sets your day up for success cannot be stressed highly enough, and I’m a raging fan.
Importantly, it’s hard to talk about a morning routine without giving a nod to the idea of actually waking up earlier.
We’ve all heard the rumbling about morning people: Morning people get more done. Morning people are more effective at everything they do. Morning people win more often.
The world might as well come clean and say what it really means: Morning people do better in life. The reality is that morning people do seem to get an awful lot done, and even night owls have reported that waking up early in the morning can make them feel more productive and more content with the work accomplished. As an experiment, try it out for yourself (this is easy if you work for yourself, but if you work for others you’ll have to vary this experiment up to perhaps include a weekend day to understand its purpose).
Work for only three hours tomorrow, and do it at 8 a.m. Then, the next day, start your work at 4 p.m. At the end of each day, think of how productive you felt. Chances are, the day you started work in the afternoon will have left you feeling behind all day—even when you put in the same number of work hours.
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