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? (Here 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 or 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.) |
| 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.
