“Ah, another day over and I’ve done loads, I’m knackered. Hmm... actually, it doesn’t feel like I’m much further forwards though. No matter, another day tomorrow.”
There is a risk for all of us as we get on with stuff: sometimes we fall into the trap of “getting things done” without stopping to check they are adding the right value. This blog has a technique and exercise to help ensure the right things are being prioritised.
Sleepwalking through activities and actions, kidding yourself they are progress
Early in my career, I came across the phrase “pointless busy work”. It refers to activities or tasks that feel related to a goal, but if you look at them a little bit harder, they are not actually moving you to an outcome you’re after.
Some examples might help explain what I am referring to.
Each example describes some pointless busy work and an alternative way to spend the time. In each example there will be a portion of the work that is valuable or necessary; these are to make the point, not be ‘perfect’.
Overly refining private drafts before getting “out there” – have you done enough to consider putting your work “live”(whether this is photography, your CV or resume, artwork, videos, publishing, new relationships, whichever apply). Perhaps start with getting feedback from a smaller, trusted set of people?
Online research to support the goal of launching your new venture – have you found enough information, for now at least, to get towards that new service and taking some tangible next steps?
Reading an industry periodical to support the goal of better client or manager engagement – what's the real outcome needed and what are the best next steps? E.g. deeper listening, improving trust, more open questions, better use of 1:1 time, more personal interactions?
Reading books and magazine articles to support a healthier life style goal – If the goal is a heathier lifestyle, what’s the first habit you can start and what is preventing you starting it?
Hours of regular binge watching in order to relax on the weekend or end of the day - Is all that time useful, or is there a habit to pare back on? I’m not saying you have to go TV-less, but it can suck a lot of time away from progressing your goals. Maybe look at the total hours and use 1, or 2, of them a week to do something else.
These examples will likely trigger some reflection on activities you undertake; you might re-purpose that time, or maybe some of it. The trick is to spot when time spent has crossed over into “pointless busy work” and the effort is not moving your goals forwards any more.
We’ll get to the suggested technique shortly; but if those have has got you thinking, start to note down some activities in your life that you feel have an element of pointless busywork. What will you do differently for each of those?
But it’s urgent! Ok, that’s fine – but what happens to the important stuff?
We almost always know what is urgent – those are the tasks that stay front and centre in our mind. We also usually know what is “up and coming” as the next urgent thing. Sometimes outcomes that are important to us, but not necessarily urgent, don’t get progressed. These tend to be at the top of our to-do list but keep getting pushed down because something urgent comes in.
We’d benefit from spotting the important, but not urgent tasks and actively move them forwards.
For many of our tasks, we may feel we don’t have much of a choice as we have responsibilities or commitments to others. Dependants and work are two obvious examples. However, for other tasks, we can stop, reflect on our time and that we’re not kidding ourselves about getting the most valuable things done.
I have found for myself, and for those, I coach, that we need to learn to generate urgency for our internal goals. There are a number of techniques that help with this, and I am going to set out one that dovetails with spotting pointless busywork.
If we can identify the pointless busywork, we can re-purpose that time to the important, but not urgent, tasks that don’t get done.
“Urgent”, “Important”: what’s the difference?
I have found through my coaching that we often consider urgency and importance as interchangeable, but with a little thought, I hope I can show they are different and that the difference is important to progressing our goals as well as getting our commitments done.
If you think of the importance of something as a WHY do I need to do something, and the urgency as WHEN do I need to do it, then we can begin to think about a list of activities differently. Doing so may help us find some important tasks that keep getting pushed out of the way for urgent things, or things that we allow to become more urgent.
The exercise will be to consider your tasks against the two simple measures: Importance and Urgency. This is not a technique I can lay claim to coming up with myself, by any means. I just find it especially useful to help make sure we focus energy on our personal drives and growth as well as the outcomes dictated by others.
What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower
Look at a few tasks and decide where they fit on each of the two scales. You can consider each scale as having two simple values or more – but I’d advise against more than 4 possible values. For example:
Important: Yes, No
Urgent: Yes, No
Or maybe more refined:
Important:
High positive impact to my goals and life
Medium impact to my goals and life
Low impact to my goals and life
Urgent:
I must do this today
This needs to get done this week
I can do this later
An idea on how to physically tackle this:
Start with a blank page, draw 2 axes and start to add the tasks that are in your head, or on to do lists. Include things you want to do, need to do, or just “do” habitually. Place them in the ‘right’ place on the page, as best as you can.
Try not to bunch everything up into the top right corner, that would defeat the point of the exercise.
Start to look at each task compared to others; you may move some around as you do.
Use small sticky notes, if you like, so you can re-position them.
It is helpful to mark the things that someone else needs you to do, differently than your own drives.
Now let’s look at what has come out of the exercise.
The ones in the top right (urgent and important) need to get done, of course, but just for now we should take some time to look at the other parts of the page and reflect on those. So try to put this set out of your mind for half and hour or so as we look at the other areas.
The tasks that are in the lower urgency, but in the high importance are the ones to reflect on first. You can probably can see that these often get pushed week by week to later. These also tend to be marked up as for your goals, rather than the tasks we do for other people. Re-purposing some time to get a few of these done each week is an important activity (link to finding time)
The tasks that are in the low urgency, low importance are the ones to try and avoid falling into doing in a sleepwalking way. These are likely to be pointless busy work: you do them, but it’s not that important for your gaols / urgent yet.
One example I have for myself is “Too much relaxing in front of the TV”; note the “too much” – there is value in my watching some TV with my wife. I try not to do too much of it, especially if I know I’m doing so to avoid something else. Feel free to identify such things but cover the ‘Too much...’ aspect of each.
As an aside: a pointless busy work warning: over engineering the above exercise to identify the pointless busy work... :-)
The tasks in the low importance, but urgent are interesting. These tend to be work tasks that you have to do but are not driving your goals forwards. These need some reflection; if these are commitments or part of your job, it is hard to adjust them. I will set out some ideas in separate blogs on this along the following lines. Reach out if these sound interesting to you and you’d like to explore a bit more:
Can any of these tasks be picked up by someone else; in your team, family, friends? Try to think about how to pass the task on in a way to fire up growth in the recipient – e.g. added responsibility?
Can you get the task done more efficiently; do you tend to procrastinate on the task so it stretches out? Are there many meetings that you have to go to, but are not efficient (probably the same for everyone...) if so – can you suggest a better approach to the meeting?
Can any of these tasks be automated at all? I don’t mean robots, but maybe there is a very manual computer task you do every day, but with some help you might be able to speed it up – who knows loads about automating Excel you might ask for a favour? Are there e-mails you write, in a very similar way, over and over – have you looked at Outlook’s ‘templates’ and ‘quick steps’ features?
Can you get anything else done while you do that task? Listen to a blog, watch a stretching video (TED talk for example) or listen to an inspiring audio book while you iron the family’s clothes.