Dear Productivity Maven,
Thanks for all your great blog posts and podcasts. I love ‘em! Maybe you can help me with something I’m struggling with.
I’m at inbox zero and now, I have lots of lists, subdivided into contexts. My lists are long, really long, and I know I’ll never get to everything–I just don’t have time! I want to get the most out of my days. How do I decide what’s important so I can focus on doing that instead of something trivial?
Signed,
Spinning in Place
__
Dear Spinning,
You’re most welcome–I’m glad that you’ve found the work I’ve done helpful. It’s a lot of fun to produce and the best part is helping people like you to become more productive. Great job on getting your tasks onto lists! And you’re right, your lists will never be at zero the way your inbox is.
Lots of people fall prey to the idea that they “don’t have time” and that the little things “aren’t important enough to do right now.” Stick a pin in this myth right now! You do have time and the little things are vitally important! I see this often with email. Person X receives an email and thinks, “I don’t have time to answer that right now,” and goes on to something else. Then time passes and X starts to feel sheepish, thinking “Well, I didn’t answer it right away…and I haven’t heard from them again…I’ll do it later.” Next thing X knows, that relationship has gone south. This is how business is lost, how collaborations turn sour, and how connections are severed.
Your mind is very powerful and it takes these little messages you send yourself and amplifies them. By telling yourself that your tasks are trivial and not worth your time, your brain generalizes that message. The thing to remember is, if it’s not worth doing and it’s not important, it shouldn’t be on your list. Period. As an antidote to the tendency to blow off the small stuff, create some routines that enable you to take on these tasks and complete them. They are vitally important to daily functioning and when you get good at them, you’ll find that bigger work gets easier, too.
Best wishes,
Tara, The Productivity Maven
Thank you for spelling this out Tara. I feel like i have a better understanding of the idea of “trivial” items and how if they are not to be done they shouldn’t be or they should be incubated or they should be questioned – “hey you! do you have a clear outcome? Are you truly a next action or do I have to something first?”