One morning, as I entered a ballroom to deliver a keynote address for a Fortune 100 telecommunications company, one of the employees approached me. She didn’t look happy. “I have to tell you something,” she said. “I’m not excited about you being here.”
I was a bit taken aback, since I hadn’t even opened my mouth yet. “No kidding,” I replied. “Do you mind telling me why?”
“Absolutely,” she continued. “I have no desire to be more productive. I’m working as hard as I possibly can. I’m killing myself with twelve-hour days and already have way too much to do. I don’t want a productivity consultant telling me to do more with less. I want to do less and achieve more.”
The lightbulb went on, and I reassured her, “That’s exactly what I’m here to help you do.”
I established my company, The Productivity Pro®, Inc., in 1992 to help people achieve Maximum Results in Minimum Time®. This woman’s description of “too much to do” and desire to “do less and achieve more” framed my twenty-year mission perfectly and inspired the title of this book.
Frankly, doing more isn’t always better. Would your manager be more impressed if you completed thirty-seven low-value tasks in one day, or just seven tasks with incredible impact? Can an eight-hour-a-day employee be more productive than a twelve-hour-a-day employee? You know the answers. What really matters is results—not check marks—and not hours. Busyness doesn’t necessarily equal productivity, no matter how you slice it. No one really cares how many hours you were in the building or if you finished your to-do list. People only care about what you’re able to produce and the value of those results.
I wrote this book to help you achieve more impactful results, not necessarily more results. I also realize the irony of asking you to spend some of your precious time reading this book, given all you already have on your plate. But all worthwhile things take time to implement, so I urge you to consider this an investment toward greater time-savings in the future.
We’ll focus on doing less and achieving more, not doing more with less—thus the subtitle, “Reduce Tasks, Increase Results, and Save 90 Minutes a Day.” The promise of this book is to be a hero at work and get a life at the same time. It’s good for you, because your results will be stellar, and you’ll achieve greater life balance. It’s good for your employer, because you won’t leave your company to search for a better life. Your satisfaction and morale will increase, and your employer’s turnover will decrease.
Productivity is a win-win scenario!
Doing less will require a reset of your default “Go, Go, Go!” setting. Today’s fast-paced, high-pressure environment often requires sixty, seventy, eighty, or more hours a week. But productivity tends to decrease as work hours increase; after all, how can you perform at your best when you’re overworked and constantly tired? You’ll make more mistakes and spend more time fixing them. You’ll get further behind and run faster to stay in one place. It’s a vicious, overwhelming cycle, and for many people, it seems impossible to break.
But buying this book proves you’re determined to try. Just stop for a minute and ask yourself: “Do I really need to work so long and hard to get everything done … or is it possible I’m being inefficient?” When you take an honest look at your daily habits, workflow, and processes, you may discover there’s a clog in your productivity.
What to Do When There’s Too Much to Do turns traditional time management on its head, because many old-fashioned techniques are meaningless for today’s working professional. When I started college in the late 1980s and attended my first time-management course, the instructor taught us to write down our schedules for the entire day, including the specific time we’d work on each task. I dutifully wrote up-to-the-minute agendas, detailing what I would do and when. From 8:00 to 8:30, I’ll do this task. From 8:30 to 9:10, I’ll do that task. Back then I could pretty much keep up with it, and my days usually went as planned. When something unexpected came up, it was fairly easy to adjust my agenda.
Then things started to change. Fax machines, voicemail, the Internet, e-mail, handhelds, apps, and all kinds of other technology exploded on the scene. The productivity game changed forever. Today, if you attempt to plan out every minute of your day, your schedule will blow up in the first five minutes.
With so much information and so much to do, it’s become harder to be productive—and yet we feel busier than ever. With the recession, we’re running lean and mean. We have greater expectations, fewer resources, and more work placed on us, which results in more time in the office and less time for life and loved ones.
Desperate workers are more stressed than ever before, as they receive information from multiple sources and attempt to track and organize it. We’re constantly communicating with more people, more quickly, through more media, so we have more conversations to recall.
If you added up the amount of time it would take to complete the tasks on a typical person’s to-do list, there might be hundreds of hours of work represented there. You can spend more time “planning” and “prioritizing” than just doing the work! Due to the blazing speed at which information flows, it’s a waste of time to keep reordering a giant to-do list. Instead, organize your life around the stuff that really matters. Adopt a systematic workflow process to help you determine your high-value tasks, protect the time to do them, and focus on their execution.
If you’ve got far too much to do and desperately need to take back some of your time, know that it’s possible to do so, assuming you’re willing to put some sincere effort into the attempt. By following the logical, intuitive workflow process I present in this book, you can wrestle your schedule into submission. Ultimately, you can recover as much as ninety minutes of your day (or even more) to use as you see fit.
But before I launch into the details of this new and unique system, there are some people I’d like to acknowledge. I thank God for the gift of all these people in my life!
I want to thank my husband, John, who is my biggest fan and supporter. He puts up with my bizarre travel schedule and entrepreneurial lifestyle with understanding and cheerfulness. You have my undying gratitude and love.
Meagan, Johnny, and James, my children, I’m so proud to be your mom I could just burst.
Thanks to my incredible office manager, Becca Fletcher, my productivity weapon of choice. I am so fortunate to have you in my life and literally don’t know what I’d do without you. Everyone needs a Becca!
I’m so grateful to Eileen Stack, my wonderful mother-in-law, who tirelessly helps our family and takes care of our children if both parents are out of town. Thank you for your unfailing love.
Mark and Darla Sanborn are great pals, and we have so much fun together. Spending time with you reminds me life’s so much more than work!
I’m indebted to my mentor of eight years, Dianna Booher, CSP, CPAE, author of forty-five books, for the countless hours of time she’s lovingly given me. I appreciate you introducing me to the team at Berrett-Koehler, who immediately believed in me and this book. Thanks to my editor, Neal Maillet, for your guidance throughout the project.
Thanks to my proofreader, Floyd Largent, for his eagle eyes and incredible editing skills.
I extend my heartfelt gratitude to our hundreds of clients, who have provided us the opportunity to work with you on the strategies in this book, learn from your feedback, see the results, and hear about your successes. Thanks for your enthusiastic support of my work.
I’m privileged to be the 2011–2012 president of the National Speakers Association. Over my nearly twenty years of membership, I’ve gained many wonderful friends, too many to mention by name, but you know who you are. Thank you for your encouragement, coaching, and camaraderie.