Move Do you want to exercise during your time off? Do you want to try something different than your normal exercise routine?
Connect Who do you want to spend time with during your time off? What does quality time look like? What activities could you do together to strengthen your connection?
Play How would you like to play on your time off? Are there hobbies you’d like to pursue, games you’d like to play, or movies you’d like to see?
Reflect How will you rejuvenate your mind and heart? Reading a book? Writing in your journal? Going for a walk? Attending a worship service?
Unplug What steps will you follow to ensure you truly disconnect? For example, leave your phone in a drawer; log off work apps; don’t think, talk, or read about work.
It’s far too easy to drift in and out of our Off Stage time without a plan, but what gets scheduled gets done—including rejuvenation. At the beginning of his journey, productivity for my client Matt was all about getting more done in less time. Using the Freedom Compass and methods like delegation he was able to finally go fully Off Stage. “I’d go into the office pretty much every morning at 6:00 and work till 5:00 or 5:30 and go in a lot on Saturday mornings from about 7:00 till 12:00 or 1:00 to wrap up,” he said. Being in the service industry, Matt faced scores of challenges with interruptions. Saturday mornings were his catch-up time. Many of us face that temptation, regardless of profession; we get behind during the week and we use our Off Stage time to tie up loose ends.
Matt put an end to that in his own business. “There are days each week I don’t go in to the office. I just stay away, and I shut off my emails on my cell phone. I don’t check them at all that day, so that allows me to get focused work done so that I don’t have to go in on Saturdays anymore,” he said. “Instead of always trying to cram more things into the day by being more productive, I’m now more precise about what I want to get done so I have more time to spend with my family, doing hobbies I love. When I’m at work I’m at work, and when I’m at home I’m at home. Work hard, play hard, but separate the two, because it puts a boundary in place.”
The Weekly Preview process doesn’t take long. As I mentioned above, once you get in the rhythm you can knock it out in as little as ten or fifteen minutes. I included a simple form in my Full Focus Planner to facilitate a fast and effective review process. The next part of designating what tasks go when and where is designing our days. There are several elements to consider, but this is a quick process as well.
Design Your Day: Your Daily Big 3
Great days don’t just happen; they are caused. I spent years going in to the office each day with no real plan in place, simply reacting to whatever happened or filling my time with whatever meeting request or interruption popped up. If that’s how you start each day, you are doomed to fail. You aren’t taking control; you’re surrendering control to everyone around you. Your plan can’t be to allow everyone else to steer your day or you’ll never get anything done that matters to you. Design a day that works for your goals and priorities.
Most of our workdays are filled with two types of activities: meetings and tasks. The combination of these two activities will be different for each of us depending on our job, and each day will look a little different depending on whether we’re working mostly Front Stage or Back Stage (see chap. 7).
Meetings represent nondiscretionary time, meaning they are pretty much set in stone the day of. You can cancel the meeting or excuse yourself, of course, but dropping out of meetings at the last minute will cost you relationship capital and put your reputation at risk. Also, you’d be doing a tremendous disservice to the other attendees who might have spent hours preparing for the meeting. That’s why it’s critical to cover these in your Weekly Preview. If you accepted the meeting and put it into your plan for the day, the only real choice you have is to show up and engage. Occasionally, I will have days that are nonstop meetings with no room for tasks, and you probably do as well. I can see those days coming, however, so I don’t plan on accomplishing any tasks then. I also do the reverse: plan days solely focused on tasks and refuse any meeting requests for that day. That’s an important step when you know you need uninterrupted time for deep work. Let your Ideal Week guide your planning.
As for tasks, I always shoot for three, and only three, key tasks each day. I call these my Daily Big 3. Now, if this sounds impossible—or even undesirable—I get it. But suspend judgment. If you can get this, it will revolutionize your work, your productivity, and your overall satisfaction level at work and at home.
Most professionals start each day with a laundry list of things they need to do, meetings they need to have, people they need to talk to, projects they need to finish, and so on. Most people set themselves up to fail by trying to tackle too much. It’s not uncommon for people to have ten to twenty tasks on their to-do list every day. This is a recipe for disappointment. Even if they accomplish five or six of those, they feel like a failure because that still leaves so many undone.
Stephen, one of my coaching clients I introduced earlier, used to work twelve-hour days, five days a week, and sometimes more. “Six to six were my working days, and even after working that many hours it was stressful not being able to accomplish everything I wanted to get done,” he told me. “I was working on a lot of tasks that I don’t think I should have been working on, and it just led to more and more frustration and then more and more on the mental desk even outside of work.” The overlong hours and mental drain were costing him time—both quality and quantity—with his wife and daughters.
The only solution Stephen had at the time was working harder. “I just kept on pushing, pushing, and pushing, and I thought, Eventually I’ll get there. Eventually I’ll start working less.” But remember the limiting beliefs from chapter 2. “Temporary overwork” is something we say to soothe ourselves about permanent overwork. If you want to stop chronic overwork, make a change: prioritize three and only three tasks.
I find the Pareto principle applies. Following the 80/20 rule, roughly 80 percent of results come from just 20 percent of actions. In my experience, the average person has between twelve and eighteen tasks on their list at any given time. For easy analysis, let’s call that fifteen. If the 80/20 rule holds, just three of those tasks are significant compared to the others. Imagine the power of focusing on the 20 percent of actions that drives the 80 percent of results. That’s your Daily Big 3.6
How do you choose your Daily Big 3? To start with, refer to your Weekly Big 3. Remember, these are the top three outcomes you must achieve for the week if you’re going to make progress on your goals and projects. Let your Weekly Big 3 inform your Daily Big 3. These should first be tasks that are in your Desire Zone and other tasks that are in Quadrant 1 or 2 of the Priority Matrix. Keeping your Weekly Big 3 in mind, start with Desire Zone activities, then move on to Quadrant 1 tasks (important and urgent), and finally to Quadrant 2 tasks (important, not urgent). Of course, you’ll get outside requests and other tasks that must be dealt with. Follow the Priority Matrix here as well. If you don’t, your day will be overwhelmed by Quadrant 3 tasks (urgent to someone else, but not important to you).
Now, this may seem rigid, but it forces you to get laser focused on what matters. It also keeps you from feeling overwhelmed. Why? Because you don’t have a long list of things you can’t get done. (Who brings their best when they know from the outset they won’t win?) Even better, 90 percent of the time, you’ll get to the end of the day with everything checked off your list. How awesome would that feel? When you follow this model, you’ll see that you’re spending every day working only on tasks that are important.
Listing only three tasks for an entire workday may seem like a cop-out, but it requires more discipline and effort than you realize. Writing out a dozen different tasks is a form of laziness, even though the list will keep you busy all day. It takes much more effort to look at the twelve things you could do and zero in on the three that really matter. And if you think completing
only three tasks a day isn’t enough to win long-term, consider the year-long implications. If you work five days a week and take off twenty-five days a year for vacations, holidays, and sick time, you’ll have 235 working days a year. If you complete three high-leverage tasks each workday, you’ll end the year with a track record of 705 completed, important tasks. Can you imagine the impact to your business if you completed 705 important and Desire Zone tasks in a year?
Jim Koch, founder of the Boston Beer Company and brewer of Samuel Adams, built his $1.5 billion business around this simple principle. Writing in Fast Company, Koch describes his typical workday. “Each morning I keep myself on track by writing down three to five of my must-do items for the day on a Post-It note,” he explains. “These are important, but not necessarily urgent items. Once my day gets going, I keep the list close by as a reminder—it’s easy to let these sit or delay and put them off for another day, but I make it a priority to cross them off my list before the end of each day.”7
The Daily Big 3 works for more than beverages. Ratmir Timashev, cofounder of billion-dollar data management company Veeam Software, keeps his list short as well. “My to-do list is never ending, so it’s important for me to prioritize,” he says. “Typically, I’ll make a daily list of the three most important things I need to get done that day. It really helps to make my day more manageable. As a morning person, I tend to complete those activities before noon, which then gives me time to address other urgent items that come up during the day.”8
Stephen has had the same experience. By focusing on a limited number of tasks, Stephen’s working half as much while growing his business—and he’s home around four to spend the afternoon with his girls. Same with my client Caleb, whom I introduced in chapter 6. “I was overwhelmed and really stressed about my weeks,” he told me. “I always had more on my list and felt overwhelmed before the day began. I thought, I’m never going to get a list down to the Big 3. I’ve got 20 things to do today!” We all do—until we get serious about working in our Desire Zone and eliminating, automating, and delegating as much of the rest as we can. That’s what Caleb did and it’s paid huge dividends. “It really is possible. Most days I am able to get clarity on my Big 3 activities. Now that I have a team, I can delegate other activities to them and focus on those Big 3.”
By focusing on just three key tasks, Caleb has felt a marked increase in his sense of control. Work is no longer overwhelming. “It’s peaceful. I can’t think of a better word than just it’s peaceful and gives you so much more energy going into your workday.” Furthermore, because he designed a game he could win—just three key tasks, instead of twenty random, energy-draining tasks—he ends the day feeling great about his progress. “I come home in a much better place because I’ve won.”
Mariel, whom I introduced in chapter 2, also mentioned the peace that comes from designing her day. “Every morning I was waking up in a panic attack of all the things that I had to do that day, and now I’m a calmer and much more peaceful person. With the systems I’ve learned, I’m able to know that I can accomplish what’s on my list and walk away from the day knowing that I’ve done at least a minimum that will get me toward my goals.” Mariel rolled the system out to her whole team, and it’s made a difference across the board. “We have an ongoing joke that we don’t know how we operated before.”
You can keep your Daily Big 3 on a Post-it Note like Koch, in a notebook, or via a task management system like Nozbe. If you struggle with designing your day, the Day Pages of the Full Focus Planner can help; that’s what I use. But wherever you keep your Big 3, free yourself to focus only on what deserves priority.
Fix the Bounds on Your Time
Seneca, a Roman philosopher who lived around the time of Jesus, wrote about the challenge we all face. “It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it,” he responded. “Life is long if you know how to use it.”
We’ve been struggling with the same issue for two thousand years—and probably a lot longer. We don’t guard our time and we squander what we have. “Men do not let anyone seize their estates, but they allow others to encroach on their lives—why, they themselves even invite in those who will take over their lives,” Seneca said. “People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.”9
The difficulty is that time is amorphous, and the future doesn’t have fixed bounds. The solution is to designate the what and when of our own schedules, starting with the week and then the day. The Weekly Preview, Weekly Big 3, and Daily Big 3 ensure we not only keep visibility on all the potential tasks we have, they also set hard boundaries around our time. This is a huge step toward defending your time against interruptions and time bandits that will come looking for you.
Now that you’ve built a layer of defense, it’s time to turn our attention to the offense. We’ll do that in chapter 9.
DESIGN YOUR WEEK AND DAY
Using the guidelines in this chapter, take the time right now for your first Weekly Preview, including your Weekly Big 3; don’t worry if it’s the middle of the week. You can download a copy at FreeToFocus.com/tools. You can also find this in the Full Focus Planner. Once you’re done, set a weekly, recurring calendar appointment with yourself to conduct your Weekly Preview every week going forward.
Next, use your Weekly Big 3 and build your Daily Big 3. Identify the top three tasks that you must accomplish today, and make sure you secure the time to do them on your schedule. I’ve baked the Daily Big 3 into the day pages. You can also see a sample at FreetoFocus.com/tools. Commit to the practice of choosing your Daily Big 3 each day for the next several weeks. After three weeks, you should be able to look back on forty-five completed high-leverage tasks that have moved you and your business forward.
9
Activate
Beat Interruptions and Distractions
My experience is what I agree to attend to.
WILLIAM JAMES
Eccentric magazine publisher and inventor Hugo Gernsback was troubled. Even in 1925, there were so many workplace distractions it seemed impossible to get anything done. To solve the problem, he suggested a new device called the Isolator. Resembling a large diver’s helmet, the Isolator would block the clickity-clack of office equipment, the ringing of phones and door chimes, and the chatter of coworkers. Through two small eyeholes a person could focus solely on the work in front of him and nothing else—at least until the oxygen tank ran out!1
Office disruptions are as old as offices. Inventor Hugo Gernsback created one solution—the Isolator—in 1925! It worked great, until it ran out of oxygen. [Bettmann/Getty Images]
As forward thinking as Gernsback was, we live under a barrage of messages and inputs today that would have stunned him. We have social media, texts, app notifications, meeting requests, calls from office phones and mobile phones, and more ambient noise than we can possibly process. The trend toward open-concept offices and cubical farms has worsened this situation for some. What we supposedly gain in collaboration and cost savings we lose in concentration.2 It’s making us so scatterbrained an entire industry has emerged around the practice of mindfulness—the idea that you can shut it all out and just be present. It’s harder than it sounds.
The Distraction Economy wants nothing more than to take our minds off what we need to do today. Why? We call it paying attention for a reason! Focus is valuable. It’s valuable to us, and it’s also valuable to others. Every ping that pulls our eyes away and every notification we take note of subtracts value from us and gives it to someone else—e.g., a coworker or an advertiser. And unfortunately, we sometimes make bad trades.
Sure, genuine emergencies pop up, but many of the disruptions we deal with are trivial and unimportant. But even disruptions we recognize as important can be reduced if we know how. When we’re focused on our most important projects and tasks, we can’t afford to allow interruptions and
distractions to derail our days and prevent us from achieving our goals. In this chapter we’ll review strategies for minimizing disruptions, maximizing focus, and making sure we can finish each day feeling like we accomplished what we set out to do.
Interruptions: Breaking In
Interruptions represent an external input that breaks your concentration—a drop-in visit, a phone call, an email or Slack message that pulls you away from the work you’re supposed to be doing. These are more than mere annoyances. They’re cancers gnawing at meaningful work. Even if you manage to complete a task, interruptions ensure that you get to the finish line slower and that the end result falls far short of your best effort. The good news is that you have more power to resist and reduce interruptions than you might think. Two actions can create an effective virtual Isolator to help you maximize your productivity.
Limit instant communication. The speed of communication has accelerated over time. When I first started working, most written communication traveled through the US Post; a letter typically took several days, maybe a week, to arrive. But then came faxes, emails, texts, and instant messaging. Whereas the phone was once the only means of instant communication, individuals and teams now communicate nonstop in real time via Slack, Microsoft Teams, and other messaging and collaboration apps.
We’ve confused speed with importance. That mistake has amplified the pace of our communication and the number of our interruptions. A quarter of respondents in one survey said they feel pressured to answer instant messages immediately after receiving them, even if they’re working on something else.3 This has a massive impact on personal productivity.4
You can’t delve into extended periods of meaningful work if you’re constantly shifting your focus when one of seventeen apps or devices alerts you about an incoming message, comment, tag, or desired action. Five years after the iPhone’s release, Apple bragged that its servers had delivered over seven trillion push notifications. In the years since, the number has only risen.5 And it’s not just your phone. Your computer, tablet, and smartwatch—each with its own ecosystem of apps and widgets and programs—add to the pings and dings and intrusive visuals. Every one of these notifications is designed to capitalize on your attention, which means you can’t.
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