Someone Else Is Creating Your To-Do List!

No, I’m not going to talk about the latest/greatest way we can leverage AI to manage our calendars. What I’m focusing on is how little control most people are exercising over their own to-do lists.

Sadly, perhaps unconsciously, we have ceded control of our to-do lists to our inboxes, text messages, calls, and social channels. As much as we try to leverage effective time management and time blocking techniques, others are controlling our to-do lists.

We have so many conflicting demands on our time, too often we don’t have the time to do the things most important to us. Recently, I was speaking with an outstanding sales team. The discussion was, “Dave, we need to find more time to prospect!” (Yes, sales people who actually loved prospecting). The issue was they were being diverted by so many things within their own company, they simply didn’t have the time to prospect.

Recently, talking to a frustrated CRO, “I’m not spending my time where I have the greatest impact! I’m constantly being pulled into things that aren’t a good use of my time!”

Take a moment to reflect:

• Before you started this morning, you probably had some key goals in mind.
• Then you opened your email. How many “crises” started to divert you from your priorities?
• Then you looked at your messages, Slack, texts. Did more things arise, further diverting you?
• Then you signed onto your social channels. Immediately, you had to reply to DMs, connection requests. Then you got engaged in doom scrolling the feed, perhaps pausing to comment on a few posts.
• Then what other interruptions arose before lunch?
• By the end of today, how many things on your to-do list are pushed? How many of your highest priorities did you get to work on?

What do we do about this? How do we start focusing on our own priorities and make better use of our time? How can you help your people focus on what’s most important?

1.  Extreme clarity on your top 3 strategic priorities.  These can’t be focused on today, this week, this month, this quarter.  These are generally a year of more.  Choose only the top 3, be very cautious about changing them.  I personally like the structure OKRs bring to thinking about these.
2. Assess your current activities.  First do they directly contribute to the achievement of at least 1 of your top 3 strategic priorities.  If you can’t make the direct connection, if it doesn’t address at least one, ignore it.  Is it important to get done, what happens if it doesn’t get done, or is deferred for a significant period of time.  Then assess, “Is it something that’s critical for me to do, or is it better done by someone else?”
3. Don’t add something to your daily task list until you have completed another task or eliminated one.  The point isn’t how long our task lists are, it’s about completing what we have determined is important.
4. Don’t surrender your list to anyone/anything else.  There are endless tools that find it very easy to add to our lists, to create additional to-dos, to add meetings.  Be very careful what “help” you accept, you are the final arbiter of the choices.
5. The two most important things you do every week is determine your weekly goals/priorities, then your daily goals/priorities.  Never surrender those to anyone else, to automation tools, or to AI.  None will never understand what’s most important.  None can associate the meaning, purpose, intention as effectively as you.  But don’t fail to allocate the time, every day to reconfirm/reset your goals, it’s the most important use of your time.
6. Don’t worry about getting this right when you first do it.  Do as much as you can to get (1) right, but don’t obsess with being perfect in prioritizing the activities to achieve your strategic priorities.  You will make errors, the important things will surface, forcing you to stop or remove those that are less important.
7. Recognize, there is always more that you need to do, but you can’t do everything.  Some things will have to be ignored.

I’ll stop here.  This isn’t intended to be a time management tutorial.  My intent is to help you recognize that your job is to figure out what you can control and impact, focus on those, and don’t worry about the rest.  

We are busy and over committed–it takes zero effort to do this–others are setting our agendas for us.  But what makes a difference is whether we are doing the things that are critical to what we and our organizations are trying to achieve.

Afterword:  Here is the AI generated discussion of this post.  Every once in a while, these discussions are far superior to the post—this falls into that category!  Enjoy!