Ask yourself, what are the tasks that actually drive performance? Most roles have three or four activities that produce the majority of the value. Everything else is maintenance!
A quick way to find yours:
- The outcome trail. Look at your last three genuine wins…a contract win, a project completed, perhaps coming up with a decision that changed direction for the better! Work backwards to the specific activity that caused each one. That’s your list, and it’s usually shorter and less exciting than you might expect!
- The absence test. For each recurring task, ask what breaks if you stop for a month. Plenty of things quietly fail this test! Non important meetings, reports nobody reads, unimportant emails etc.
- Do you get multiple benefits from a task? Does this task self magnify! Writing a system, training someone, building a relationship, or improving a process pays off repeatedly. What gives you value add?
- Your cognitive capacity isn’t constant across a day. Most people get between two and four hours of genuinely high quality thinking, usually at the same time each day…for many that’s the first few hours after fully waking, although a minority peak in the evening.
Energy management is mostly about the inputs nobody counts as work:
Sleep is the single largest determinant of how efficient you are the next day…larger than any productivity system.
Movement during the day, even a walk, restores your energy better than continuing to push…take breaks! Genuine breaks mean disengaging, not switching to a phone. Boundaries between work and non work matter, because unresolved work thoughts consume energy without producing anything.
What to do this week…pick your top two big “win win” tasks. Block your peak window for them on three days. Batch the low value admin work into one afternoon slot…you wont need perfection on these tasks! That’s your evidence for cutting more!
The uncomfortable part is that this usually requires disappointing someone. High performance is rarely a scheduling problem; it’s a willingness to recognise what is not important!
Peter Drucker
