Do you know the feeling where you feel like you’re plowing through work, do a lot of it, but feel dissatisfied at the end of the day?
I used to have many of those days. I had started developing a system for keeping track of what I was doing, and it worked well on the surface.
Often though, checking off tasks I thought needed to be done just left me feeling tired and unaccomplished.
The problem?
I knew what I was doing, but I didn’t consider the impact of what I was doing. Instead, I implicitly assumed that every task had equal weight.
We all want to maximize the positive impact of how we spend our time. What this positive impact means is highly personal and something you need to discover for yourself.
Too often though, we don’t take the time to figure out what that impact is. This leads to just following orders, doing things on auto-pilot, and underachieving the potential impact we could make with our actions.
Not only do tasks generate unequal results, but according to the Pareto Principle, 20% of the work leads to 80% of the results! That also means 80% of energy is wasted on things that bring minimal benefit.
Actionable advice for this week: figure out your 20%.
- Look back on the tasks you completed over the past 30 days.
- Rate the positive impact of their completion from 1-10.
- What kind of tasks left the highest impact? Focus more on those, and try doing fewer tasks with a lower impact.