A More Productive Rhythm
Lord Chesterfield, whom we quoted at the start of the chapter, viewed single-minded focus as a measure of one’s intelligence. “Steady and undissipated attention to one object is a sure mark of a superior genius,” he said.13 I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say MegaBatching and planning your Ideal Week will usher you into the ranks of genius—but it’s a great start.
Spreading your focus over a million different inputs undermines your productivity, creativity, momentum, and satisfaction. Consolidation—and the focus it provides—offers a better way. By practicing MegaBatching and intentionally structuring your week, you can create the time and space to accomplish goals that otherwise might have seemed out of reach. It’s not a matter of genius-level intellect; it’s simply a matter of focus and intentionality—two powerful forces that anyone can harness.
Keep in mind that your Ideal Week is just that—ideal. It won’t happen every week. In fact, it might not happen most weeks. Life is full of emergencies and unplanned adventures, especially for high-achievers like us. When emergencies pop up, you’ll need to pivot. The Ideal Week keeps you from getting disoriented in the process; you know exactly how to get back on track because you already planned it.
That said, once you put firm boundaries in place and force yourself to stay within them for a while, it’s amazing how natural it becomes to fall into the weekly rhythm regardless of what’s going on. You can think of your Ideal Week like a target. You won’t be able to hit the bull’s-eye every time, but you’ll hit it a lot more often once you know what you’re aiming for. Over time, you will be able to use it to guide your work so you become more focused, present, and effective.
How do you adjust for the bumps in the road that throw off your aim? The answer is found in the Weekly Preview. We’ll cover that next, along with a simple method for designing your days.
PLAN YOUR IDEAL WEEK
It’s time to put some action behind the detailed planning we did in this chapter. Download your Ideal Week template at FreeToFocus.com/tools or use the one in the . We reviewed the Ideal Week planning process in detail in this chapter, and I bet some of you have already started yours. If you haven’t completed it already, be sure to finish sketching out your Ideal Week before moving on. This is the framework you will use next to unlock unprecedented focus in your weekly and daily task planning.
8
Designate
Prioritize Your Tasks
If you don’t prioritize your life, someone else will.
GREG MCKEOWN
In the US at any given minute five thousand airplanes are flying overhead, making more than forty thousand flights every day.1 Air traffic controllers are responsible for making sure they arrive when and where they should without hitting planes leaving the ground. It’s tougher than it sounds. One controller described the difficulty of tracking thirty planes at once. “It’s like playing ping-pong with 10 people,” he said.2 Every now and then it gets too close for comfort. One pilot complained to NASA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System, “We were already close to the preceding aircraft such that we had to fly high on the glide path to avoid wake turbulence, and they cleared an aircraft on the runway before our arrival that just barely got airborne before we landed.”3
A key productivity skill is learning to designate what tasks you’ll do and when you’ll do them. If you try landing every plane at once, you’ll create midair collisions that will destroy your most productive efforts.
Aviation officials call that a “loss of separation.” It’s scary to imagine, but instances are extremely rare, and collisions are even rarer. Compare that with another busy environment—our task lists. We often try landing twelve tasks at once, and projects bump and overrun each other all day long. When we suffer a “loss of task separation” we end up falling behind, making mistakes, and losing control of our time and activity.
Even after you prune your task list in the cutting phase, you still might find yourself facing a huge list of tasks and responsibilities. We are all busy, and we could all come up with an endless list of things that could be done. We may even convince ourselves they should be done. But do they all have to be done right now? The answer, I’m sure, is no. You never have to land all your planes at once. Just because something is important doesn’t mean it’s important right now. Of course, you can’t defer all your tasks for a later time. The trick is to systematically decide what deserves your attention now, what deserves your attention later, and what doesn’t deserve your attention at all. In this chapter we’ll examine how to stage your tasks by designing your weeks and days. It’s about designating what goes where and when. We’ll start with the week.
Design Your Week: The Weekly Preview
Leaders and professionals rarely have big initiatives that are accomplished in a single week. Rather, we face complex projects that take several weeks, even months, to complete. Despite our best efforts to maintain focus over the long haul, it’s easy to let the beast get away from us. The Distraction Economy may derail you on Monday, and it could be Thursday before you realize how off track you are.
The good news is that you can design your week to keep visibility on your major tasks and review your progress as you go. The trick is to break down your major goals and initiatives into manageable next steps. Then you can map those next steps onto your week by identifying three outcomes you need to hit to make the progress you want. These are the key outcomes that move the ball down the field, yard by yard, toward the goal line. I cover part of this process as it pertains to goals in my book Your Best Year Ever. Now it’s time to cover it in detail.
The Weekly Preview consists of six steps that will enable you to keep track of all the tasks whizzing overhead and establish a sense of control over your time. You can complete this anytime you want, but it’s critical that you do it. The best times I’ve found are Friday afternoon, as you finish up the workweek; Sunday evening, before the new workweek begins; or Monday morning, first thing as the week begins. My preference is Sunday evening—beyond emergencies that occasionally crop up, it’s the one exception I make for my rejuvenation practice of unplugging mentioned in chapters 3 and 7. You should pick what works best for you. Be sure to schedule it as a recurring appointment on your calendar and honor that commitment to yourself. Schedule thirty minutes at first. Once you get used to it, you may find you can knock it out in as little as ten or fifteen minutes. It’s just a matter of your personality and the nature of your work.
This process is an opportunity to get your head above the chaos (“ping-pong with ten people”) and line up your tasks and action items so they best fit your schedule and responsibilities. This is the key to staying on top of your projects and assignments. The result of a successful week is knowing you did everything you could to keep control of your week, make progress on your big goals and projects, and make your colleagues, clients, family, and yourself happy with your results. Your Weekly Preview should make it clear how well you hit those marks, and it will also ensure you up your game in the coming week. Let’s detail the six steps.
Step 1: List Your Biggest Wins. The first thing you’ll do in your Weekly Preview is take a moment to reflect on your biggest wins from the past week. List your top accomplishments, the things you’re most proud of and that made the biggest impact on your life and work. Be intentional here, even if it doesn’t feel natural at first. High-achievers too often focus on their shortcomings—what they didn’t accomplish—instead of on their wins. That misguided focus can kill your confidence. Focusing on wins instead generates feelings of gratitude, excitement, and personal efficacy and sets you up to tackle big things in the upcoming week.
Step 2: Review the Prior Week. Next, perform a mini After-Action Review. Carefully go through the prior week to recall any lessons you learned and adjustments you should make to see improvement in the near future. You’re looking to answer three primary questions. First, how far did you get on your major tasks from the prior week? (Her
e I’m specifically talking about your Weekly Big 3—more on that in a moment.) This is your chance for honest self-reflection. Evaluate your progress on your key initiatives from the preceding workweek. Did you knock them all out? Is there still work to do? (By the way, even if you fall short, you want to give yourself partial credit for the progress you made. High-achievers can be hard on themselves for not accomplishing everything they set out to do and rob themselves of the joy of the gains they made.) Answering this question is important because it plays into the next question.
Second, what worked and what didn’t? Were there interruptions or distractions you hadn’t counted on? What were they? Who caused them? Could you have avoided them? What about your plan? Was it good? Did you budget your time well? The goal here is to note what strategies or tactics were effective and then identify anything wrong with your behavior or planning so you can upgrade your performance the next week.
Third and finally, what will you keep, improve, start, or stop doing based on what you just identified? This is where you distill your learning into an actionable lesson. It’s also where you give yourself the opportunity to truly grow. How will you adjust your behavior or planning going forward? People who can learn from their experiences and use those lessons to make positive changes in their behavior will advance quickly. Few people take the time to do this, so this can make you stand out from the crowd.
Step 3: Review Your Lists and Notes. Our task lists and daily notes can grow like weeds over the course of a week. It’s important to subject these to a quick review so they don’t get out of hand. I recommend starting with your deferred tasks. These are tasks you’ve intentionally decided to bring in for a landing later. If you use a project management tool, you can refer to that for status updates and future planning. As a side note, I also advise keeping your task lists in one place (two places max): for instance, a digital solution such as Nozbe or Todoist, your calendar, or a paper planner. Consolidating your lists will make it easier to keep track of items. The more places you keep tasks and notes the more likely you’ll drop balls.
Next, review delegated tasks. These are tasks you’ve assigned to others. This gives you a chance to put those projects back on your radar and follow up with the person working on them if necessary.
Now scan through your notes from the week. These could be running commentary on your day, observations in meetings, ideas for the future, or other insights you’ve captured throughout the week pertaining to what you’re working on. There will be gems in those lines, and you don’t want to drop any good ideas or forget any tasks. To further guard against forgotten tasks, use your review time to take one of the four following actions:
Eliminate. If a task is no longer relevant, cut it.
Schedule. If you want to tackle something later, put it on your calendar. Batch similar tasks as much as possible, according to your Ideal Week.
Prioritize. If you know you want to tackle a task this week but you’re neutral on when, prioritize it. Add it to your list of priority tasks for the week, what I call your Weekly Big 3 (hang tight, details coming soon).
Defer. If it’s a task you still want to do, but you don’t have time this week, you can just leave it on the list. Keep it on the back burner and consider it again during your next review.
Step 4: Check Goals, Projects, Events, Meetings, and Deadlines. One of the biggest reasons people stumble with their most important goals and projects is they lose visibility. The hectic blur of daily work can obscure even the most important targets and tasks. I mentioned my client Rene earlier. This was her challenge. “It’s kind of funny, because I’m in the aviation business,” she admitted, “and when you’re in the aviation business you think about being at a 30,000- or 40,000- or even 50,000-foot elevation.” Unfortunately, Rene spent a lot of her weeks and days in reactive mode. “I used to be stuck in the weeds all of the time. I was grounded.”
The Weekly Preview process lets you correct that problem. This is about elevating your vantage point on your work. Review any goals you’re pursuing and reconnect with your key motivations. Just as important, take a moment to identify steps you could take in the coming week to reach your goal. Use this time to also review key projects and deliverables and identify what tasks you must do and which you could do to complete them.
Now it’s time to check your calendar for the coming week (or the next several, depending on what’s looming). This is a great opportunity to see if you need to do any preparation, delegate any tasks, or tie down any loose ends before the new week begins. List upcoming events and pending deadlines by date so you can sequence your work. You can’t land two planes on the same runway at the same time. It’s important to check your upcoming meetings as well; if you need to reschedule or cancel, the more notice you provide, the better.
Step 5: Designate Your Weekly Big 3. Once you’ve reviewed all your goals, projects, deadlines, and the rest, it’s time to get proactive and establish your Weekly Big 3. I define your Weekly Big 3 as the three most important things you need to accomplish in the coming week to keep making progress toward your major goals and projects.4 I’m sure there are more tasks than you could accomplish in a week, but marathons are finished one stride at a time.
So how do you decide what goes on your Weekly Big 3? One helpful filter is the time-tested Eisenhower Priority Matrix popularized by Stephen Covey.5 It’s a simple grid divided into four quadrants in which the horizontal axis corresponds to urgency, the vertical to importance.
Quadrant 1 indicates tasks that are both important and urgent. These should obviously get the first claim to your time and deserve to be prioritized above everything else. I should also note that important and urgent mean these things are personally important and urgent for you. Too often we get pulled into tasks that are important and urgent to someone else but not necessarily to us. Consider your quarterly goals. How much time do you have left on the clock? What about major deadlines for key projects? Quadrant 1 items should get top billing on your Weekly Big 3.
As you design your day, prioritize Quadrant 1 and 2 tasks, clear Quadrant 3 tasks quickly (can you delegate any of these?), and eliminate all Quadrant 4 tasks.
Quadrant 2 refers to tasks that are important, but not urgent right now. You can easily defer these tasks, but watch out! Because they’re not urgent, Quadrant 2 tasks are often neglected. Then the circling planes run out of gas, and we either cause an emergency or miss an opportunity—or both. When you identify a Quadrant 2 task, also plan to attack it soon.
Quadrant 3 consists of tasks that are time sensitive and important to others, but not necessarily to you. This is where many of us run aground each week. If you aren’t careful, you’ll allow other people’s priorities to supersede your own, derailing your own productivity and stopping progress toward your key goals and major projects. Evaluate Quadrant 3 items on a case-by-case basis. Ask yourself three key questions:
If you say yes, are you putting a Quadrant 1 or 2 item at risk?
What trade-off are you willing to make to accommodate this new Quadrant 3 request? In other words, what will you have to say no to in order to say yes to this request?
Will you end up resenting your participation or the other person if you agree?
If you review these questions and still feel like giving someone else space on your list is a good idea, go for it. However, be careful not to confuse urgency with importance.
Quadrant 4 indicates tasks that are neither urgent nor important to you. Quadrant 4 items should never make it onto our calendars or task lists. But they still do, don’t they? I think the reason usually comes down to one of three factors: First, confusion. We simply don’t stop to evaluate the activity or task. We jump into it without thinking and end up falling down the rabbit hole. Second, guilt. We feel like we should do it, even if we know it’s not our responsibility. We let guilt override our better judgment. Finally, the fear of missing out. We’re scared of saying no to new opportunities—whether they make sense in our world o
r not.
As you designate your Weekly Big 3, don’t let other people’s priorities crowd out your own. If you really want to be free to focus, you need to set a goal of spending 95 percent of your time on Quadrant 1 and 2 activities. That may seem impossible to you now, but it’s not. As you’re building your list, ask:
Is this important (to me)?
Is this urgent (to me)?
The answers to those two little questions will build the framework for organizing your priorities and, ultimately, securing your freedom. It made a huge difference for Rene. “My life was driven by my email inbox, not by my goals. That made me feel chaotic and like I hadn’t accomplished anything at the end of the day,” she said. “I’m a little bit embarrassed to say this as a company owner, but it used to be that I’d get up in the morning and I didn’t really want to go to work, but Free to Focus has enabled me to pick out my most important tasks and get those accomplished and leave me enough margin to do things that I think are making a difference in the world around me.”
Step 6: Plan Your Rejuvenation. Chapter 3 covered this in detail, and we mentioned it again in chapter 7 when discussing your Ideal Week. The Weekly Preview is where the rubber meets the road. Remember the seven practices of rejuvenation: sleep, eat, move, connect, play, reflect, and unplug? Take time here to schedule them into your nights and weekends, or whatever time you reserve for rejuvenation. If you struggle with this, as many high-achievers do, you might want to scan these prompts for each of the seven practices:
Sleep How much sleep do you want to get each night? What time will you have to go to bed to make sure that happens? What about a nap?
Eat Are there any restaurants you’d like to try or meals you’d like to cook? (You might combine this with a connection activity.)
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