I frequently take long road trips to and from Nashville, and I often find myself critiquing highway infrastructure—specifically, the shocking difference when you cross a state line.
If you find yourself heading east on Interstate 24 in southwestern Kentucky, you will eventually cross over into Tennessee. I love this distinct area because the portion of the road in Kentucky is a bumpy mess.
Initially, you may not necessarily notice the dilapidated condition of the road were it not for the dramatic difference just a few miles away.
As soon as you cross into Tennessee on your way toward Nashville, the sun is a little brighter, the trees lining the road are a little greener, and the road is miraculously smoother.
Every vehicle begins to drive faster, the friction on the road disappears, and you are greeted with a large “Welcome to Tennessee” sign that directs to you a beautiful visitor's center.
The rest of the drive into the city is amazing. It is fast, clean, and highly efficient, and I am sure I would not appreciate this specific section of road were it not for the pervasive bumps, potholes, and missing paint on the Kentucky side (sorry, Kentucky).
The clear difference between one state's highway maintenance and another's is the difference between a rough ride and smooth sailing—between dodging bullets and stepping on the gas—between obnoxious friction and beautiful harmony.
Friction is slowing you down.
Bumps in the road are delaying your progress and positioning obstacles between you and your vital few goals. Reducing or eliminating friction in your life and work is essential to cutting nonsense and accomplishing your goals faster.
When you minimize the amount of time spent on things that need to happen, remove excess bloat from your calendar, and smooth the path between point A and point B, you give yourself the best chance to free up time, reduce stress, and maximize your results.
In the previous chapter, you identified and removed unnecessary tasks, projects, events, and distractions from your calendar.
Now, with the remaining tasks on your plate, there are a variety of ways to arrange the puzzle of your calendar to get your most important work done. One highly effective method (which you will likely fall in love with right away) is intentionally procrastinating.
That's right!
You have my permission to put off your work—but there is an effective way to pull this off without finding yourself missing deadlines or dropping projects altogether.
Our goal is to reduce friction by scheduling must‐do tasks at the exact right time. Using the pressure of looming deadlines, you can intelligently procrastinate when it serves you best.
Some tasks have no specific deadline, and therefore can be accomplished whenever you have a free minute (or eliminated if they are not important enough to be scheduled).
Other tasks absolutely must be accomplished by a strict cutoff time, in which case your calendar will have to align to those deadlines in a way that both completes the task on time and provides you the creative capacity to maximize the quality of your work.
For example, if my publisher told me I had twenty years to write this book, I may have postponed the work and taken the full twenty. However, I had six months, and that was an ideal time frame to accomplish the task, stay focused with a deadline, and hit my quality bar.
Elaborating on this hypothetical twenty‐year deadline, if I decided to spend two full decades working on this book I would inevitably do one of two things:
Deadlines need to be set in such a way that we can procrastinate just enough to complete the work on time without feeling extraordinary pressure (which could cause undue stress and a drop in quality) or endlessly expanding our work to fit the excessive time we were allowed, which is also known as Parkinson's Law (BusinessDictionary, 2017).
When you set appropriate time boundaries for your work, you can avoid waiting until the last minute and, simultaneously, not spend any more precious time than you would need.
It is more of an art than a science, but we are seeking to achieve our minimum viable effort, exerting no more than is necessary to get exactly what we intended.
This requires a bit of guesswork, experimentation, and a willingness to fail a few times. However, as you improve your self‐awareness and find your rhythm with scheduling your work, you can dramatically reduce the amount of time you spend on any given task and maintain or improve the final product.
Also, though I was given six months to write this book, I wrote the whole thing from start to finish in less than three.
As much as I believe that I hate being pressured to do anything, nothing causes me to focus more in the moment and execute more effectively than an important and urgent deadline.
Pressure is the ultimate motivation for important work. When you have a strong reason to do something, you are compelled to act.
And as surprising as it may be, you do not need as much time as you think. You can do more with less, and a pressing deadline can be your best friend.
There is nothing worse in the world of productivity than prioritizing work that never had to get done in the first place. You will get the satisfaction of checking off a box on your to‐do list while going nowhere.
You are effectively treading water, spinning in circles, running on a hamster wheel, or ___________________ (insert your favorite metaphor for wasting your time here).
Real work deserves your attention. Urgent but meaningless distractions deserve the delete key.
Every office is a minefield. In the process of scheduling important work at just the right time, be on the lookout for misleading tangents and dangerous rabbit holes that will throw you off course, significantly delaying your progress.
As Stephen Covey taught in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, we have to filter the urgent and unimportant (frequent distractions) from the truly urgent and important (real priorities). Very few things need to get done, while most need to be ignored, and it is your job to figure out which is which (Covey 2013, 160).
When you have a clear priority—an important and urgent task—you can effectively schedule it, leverage a healthy dose of pressure, and intelligently procrastinate as it best serves you.
Tiny decisions are the most treacherous.
It is the little things we do, or start to do, that grow over time, pick up speed, and escape our control. The tiny decisions become runaway trains, and our innocent choices blossom into bad habits.
We only meant to act upon these choices once or twice, but over time, and without warning, we discover those bad habits have grown into tiny villains and, eventually, colossal monsters.
For this book, a bad habit is any repeated behavior that impedes your ability to make direct progress on your vital few goals.
Anything you do over and over again that prevents you from spending precious time on what matters most is a bad habit, and it needs to be eradicated.
Essentially, bad habits are emotional addictions to activities with a low ROI.
The initial hit of dopamine and euphoria is enticing, but over time the high fades, leaving us only with the addiction of chasing what we once had.
Vegging on the couch is great after a long run or a hard week at the office. Lounging on the sofa for five hours a day, every day, is no longer fun or sexy—it is a direct barrier to your health and your future.
This may be the most difficult part of habit change: acknowledging that you are drowning because of choices you have made. You committed to too many things, started too many bad habits, and said yes to too many activities that were destined to throw you off course.
The good news is that you can change. You have the power to “un‐commit,” to right the ship, to eradicate a bad habit and become a new person.
Habit change is not an immediate process, but neither was forming the bad habit in the first place. Long‐term change takes a long time, but the time will pass anyway.
In a year, you will be a year older. The only question is: When you look back one year from now, will you have made better choices? Will you have changed? Will you have stopped the cycle?
Aside from eliminating a task entirely, delegating it to someone else may be the most direct method of removing it from your to‐do list.
In sticking with our goal of reducing friction so that you can accomplish your vital few goals more effectively, passing off your work to another capable person is a sure‐fire way to allow you to do what you do best.
One of the fundamental principles of time management often missed by overzealous high achievers is that you do not have to do everything yourself.
Let me say that one more time.
You do not have to do it all—and you should not even attempt to do so.
Passing the baton to someone else (or a machine through automation) is not a fancy privilege for managers who can assign work to their directs—it is a vital component for all of us to let go of everything that is not the highest and best use of our time.
Sometimes we have no choice and find ourselves completing tasks that someone else could and likely should be doing for us. As an entrepreneur, I can tell you firsthand that I wear many hats—way too many hats.
As an achiever, you too wear too many hats, and it is time you took some off.
If eliminating a task or project is not possible, consider how you can off‐load your work in the most effective manner.
If you are in a position to directly pass off work to a direct report, and it is in the best interest of both you and the direct, go for it. Utilizing the strengths, talents, and availability of those who work for you is smart business, but it is also a tremendous gift and can free up some much‐needed time.
Hiring virtual assistants can be a simple and affordable solution to many problems. Over the years, I have outsourced more work than I believed was possible, and in many cases, I saved myself tremendous time, energy, and money.
Much of our work today can be handled more effectively with a well‐built system than by our own two hands. If your task can be automated, invest the needed time today to free up tremendous time tomorrow.
If no one else can handle it, and you really should not be working on it, let it go. Delete the task and move on. I have surprised myself many times when I realize my “important” projects never have to be completed—ever.
If you are anything like me, a self‐identified control freak, letting go of vitally important work can be highly emotional. I never want someone else to do something that I know I could do better myself.
The problem is that this mindset is one of the direct causes of high stress, high blood pressure, long work hours, and burnout.
You cannot and should not do everything.
Yes, I will continue to say this over and over again throughout the book because it is the message you (cough—I—cough) need to hear again and again.
Though it is possible that your work will not be done to your normal standards, letting someone else take the reins means you can spend your precious time on the vital few tasks that only you can do.
There are only a few tasks meant just for you, and it is your job to identify those tasks and spend as much time on them as possible.
The only way this is possible is if other people or systems take over everything else as much as possible.
Friction is slowing you down. Bumps in the road are delaying your progress and positioning obstacles between you and your vital few goals. Reducing or eliminating friction in your life and work is essential to cutting nonsense and accomplishing your goals faster.
You can reduce friction by scheduling must‐do tasks at the exact right time, neither too early nor too late. Using the pressure of looming deadlines, you can intelligently procrastinate when it serves you best to achieve your minimum viable effort, exerting no more than is necessary to get exactly what you intended.
You should not even attempt to do so. Passing the baton to someone else (or a machine through automation) is not a fancy privilege for managers who can assign work to their directs—it is a vital component for all of us to let go of everything that is not the highest and best use of our time.
There is nothing worse in the world of productivity than prioritizing work that never had to get done in the first place. You will get the satisfaction of checking off a box on your to‐do list while going nowhere. Real work deserves your attention. Delete and prevent all urgent but meaningless distractions.
We all have bad habits, old tendencies, prior commitments, and emotional attachments to the things we do on a regular basis. In all likelihood, your biggest obstacles are your habits, and the beliefs you hold about what is possible for you to achieve. Tackle your obstacles head‐on.
Some work is best done at the last minute—not all work, but some. Carefully analyze the projects on your plate and determine what is best suited for working on just ahead of the deadline. This one strategy alone could dramatically reduce unnecessary waste and worry.