The Not-So-Secret Productivity Hack To Boost Your Focus and Master Your Priorities
“The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.”
Are your everyday decisions piling more on to your already hectic workload? I bet they are. How do I know this? The art of saying no has entire books dedicated to it. Saying yes is easy. Have you ever heard someone say, it was really hard to say yes to eating that pizza, watching six hours of Netflix, or dropping a couple of hundred bucks at Costco? If you don’t prioritize your life, someone else will.
Hence the saying – easy choices hard life, hard choices easy life.
We all seem to think we’ll become time management wizards who can cast spells to manipulate time. We’ll have the ability to do more than we are (despite the fact we already feel overloaded, overwhelmed and are coasting on fumes).
What makes it even more challenging is when you start to find a little success. Gifts of opportunity battle for your last slivers of free time. Your younger self would have sold their soul to get a chance at what you're now having a hard time saying no to. We sometimes forget that we're no longer in that position, or we find ourselves afraid of what happens if an opportunity like this never comes along again.
The more you take on, the less effective you become at what got you to where you are right now.
That's not to say you need to start saying no to everything that comes across your plate. Not at all. But a decision-making framework that helps you make hard decisions? That's like the obvious yes to a mouth-watering bite of a zero-calorie pizza. It's a no brainer.
The Pareto principle is your zero-calorie pizza. It lets you toss out all the extra calories so you can double down on the deliciousness. All flavour, no filling.
It's based on the universal law that 20 percent of the things you do give you 80 percent of the results you want. Take the example of someone wanting to lose weight and get in better shape. Here's a general breakdown of the things you'd be spending most of your time on.
Research the best way to lose weight.
Research the best running gear.
Research the best diet.
Research the best app to track your food consumption.
Research the best app to map your run and track stats.
Schedule when you're going to run.
Plan where you're going to run.
Decide how long to run for.
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
Run.
What two will truly drive the results you want? It's obvious, right? Eat food. Not too much. Mostly Plants. And run. That's not to say everything else is a waste of time, but you sure as hell shouldn't give them equal playing time.
It helps when we see and treat time as the valuable resource it is. It's the great equalizer because it's a fixed amount that you're given each day. No more and no less than Elon Musk, Brene Brown, Martin Luther King Jr., and your Uncle Terry who invests all his time in his funeral DJ business. Those who learn to invest their energy wisely reap the greatest rewards.
Start to imagine a life of freedom as the central focus of how you make decisions for your time. Guard it like your life and career depend on it (because they do). Offer it up freely and it will get ripped apart like a feeding frenzy in a shark tank. You can't get ahead, much less survive on the scraps that no one else wants.
You're either investing your time or you're spending it, but in both cases, your efforts are compounding. "It doesn't matter how successful or unsuccessful you are right now," author James Clear found in his research. "What matters is whether your habits are putting you on the path toward success. You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results."
An easy-to-follow plan for hacking off dead weight so the work that matters can flourish:
What result do you want to accomplish in the next 90 days? Increase your sales, get a promotion, make family a priority, be in the best shape of your life, or find clarity in your business and life?
Once you know the result you're after, you can apply the same principles James Clear used to sell millions of books and grow his blog into one of the most popular in the world.
Make a list of the 10 things you spend the most time on.
Circle the two that truly drive your results. Do more of those.
Look at the others. Eliminate ruthlessly. Automate or outsource what you can. Press pause on the rest.
Repeat.
If you're struggling to think of the two that drive results, ask yourself if you only had two hours per day to dedicate to this result, what would you work on during those hours to be most effective?
The idea behind this question is to help you cut out tasks that don't start with the end in mind. Don't obsess over all the work you currently do. As we've already found out, you have a lot on your plate that has nothing to do with the results you're interested in.
Look at the rest of the list and cut the filler. If it's things that still need to get done, automate, outsource or chunk these jobs to specific dedicated times. Otherwise, press pause on the rest.
It's a simple rinse and repeat.
Do more of what works.
When you focus on work that matters, you create a life that matters.
The days where you feel lost at sea, drifting between a to-do list and balancing life, is when you've lost sight of where you're going.
Knowing the two things that drive the results you want means you'll never feel lost again. It's like having a north star to guide you, even if the environment around you feels unfamiliar.
Don't let the simplicity of this tool fool you. “It's not the daily increase but daily decrease." Bruce Lee was talking about improving our lives. It's a chance to "hack away at the unessential.”
Take for example, if around 80 percent of your sales result from only 20 percent of your audience and they all buy through email, that's a clear signal as to where you should focus your time. But if you're spending all your time on TikTok because your seven-year-old nephew said it was the wave of the future, you've all but guaranteed you're going to fizzle out.
Ignoring a law of nature is a sure-fire way to set yourself up for failure.
The power of Pareto’s principle is that it helps you to cut through the noise and reconnect with what's most important. He may have died in 1226, but Saint Francis of Assisi understood that every journey begins when you "start by doing what’s necessary, then what’s possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible."
Why do we put off decisions that could give us a better future? I've been at that crossroads many times in my life. Whether it was a decision to start my own business, launch a podcast or even ask my partner to marry me. I knew all three of these decisions would give me a better life. But in the back of my head, all I could think about is what if I ended up being a colossal failure?