Busyness! How to reduce wasted effort (a step by step guide)

Busyness - the addiction of many working professionals these days! It's sad that people choose to wear their overwhelm as a badge of honor. It's also inefficient. If you've got important goals you're working towards, the worst thing you can do is try to get MORE done.

The bedrock of effective productivity is prioritization. Before anything else, it's important that you choose to get the right things done. The most productive person is not the one who churns out the most work, it's the individual who can separate the necessary work from the rest. The skill of being able to prioritize is not only beneficial for your wellbeing, it's useful to your employer or your business if you're self employed.

So how do you prioritize and work more efficiently? It's outlined below in four steps. These steps might be a new paradigm from what your currently do. Take it at your own pace.

1- Pick your outcome
This may seem simple but it's important, but the amount of time you can waste working toward a vague objective is enormous. Don't discount this step! Write your outcome down.

2- Determine the actions that carve the most direct path
What is the shortest path between point A and point B? A straight line! It's easy to overcomplicate our goals because we trick ourselves into believing we need something or someone to achieve it. For example you might think to launch your business you NEED a marketing budget of xzy dollars. Or that it would be impossible to reach your sales target at work without support from that one mentor or supervisor at work. We can spend weeks or months building huge lists of everything that needs to happen to reach out goal. Instead the best practice is to simply. Ask yourself "what needs to be true to reach my objective?" The list will be shorter than you think.

3- Schedule the needle moving activities
Here's the lynchpin of the whole process - scheduling the work. In the whirlwind of life and work it's easy to get pulled in a million different directions fulfilling people's expectations, checking off inconsequential to do list items, and browsing social media. To reach your objective quickly you need to put the most important tasks you defined in the previous step as events in your calendar. Literally schedule in the most important tasks. Sunday afternoon or Monday morning, look at what the next steps are to reach your objective, then look at your upcoming week. Try to schedule time slots when you know you'll be at your best. Energized, focused, and ready to tackle the task. For me that's first thing in the morning. Do whatever works for you.

4- Let everything else fall into place
When you prioritize the tasks that will get you to your objective, by default you will be deprioritizing other tasks. This is expected and okay. To accomplish something great you're not going to be all buttoned up in every area of your life. Embrace the trade off that working diligently towards your goal will mean other pieces of your life and work will fall through the cracks. This is not permission to completely abandon your family, your values, or the expectations of your boss. Instead it's a conscious embrace that we can only truly prioritize one or two things in our life at a time. We can change what we prioritize at any time. What we can't do is prioritize 8 goals and expect to achieve any of them.

Properly applied you can cut out all the busyness from your life. Just by prioritizing the right things and letting everything fall into place. Remember my friend, you're doing better than you think and you're worth more than you know!

Full Transcript: 

what's up my good people let's talk about how to reduce the wasted effort time and energy in your work day I think we could all use a bit more free time and a bit more speed towards our goals and if you can just sit through this video I'll tell you how to be more efficient with your time so that you can get the right things done and therefore free up your time in the evenings and the weekends and also move faster towards your goals see I think the problem is today too many people wear this badge of honor of busy and they think just because they get a bunch of stuff done on their to-do list throughout the day that they're somehow more effective but mature productivity is knowing not that we need to get a bunch of stuff done but more that we need to decide what we should get done before we even start it's much more important to know what is important and What needs to get done and what's the priority than it is to know how many tasks we got done today or what the volume of work we got done is so we're going to talk about how to prioritize better in this video because really at the end of the day to become more productive and to reduce the wasted time on your schedule you got to get the right things done and you got to get them done first and let the rest fall where it may so step one here is to choose the outcome we're going for now this seems very simple but I think a lot of people aren't true with themselves about what the actual goal is now maybe your goal or your objective or your kpi was given to you by a boss so you know exactly what it is maybe you're in your own business or maybe your goal is to learn a specific skill so you have to Define what that outcome is for yourself but make sure it's very clear writing it down is a very very simple first step what are we moving towards here and is it connected with what's important to me if your outcome that you're working on is is difficult laborious it sucks you know it's just taking longer than you thought or you're getting distracted maybe it's time to ask yourself if you're going after the wrong thing that's a topic for a different video let's talk about let's say you have your objective you have your outcome you're working towards that's step one it's written down okay step two we need to determine the shortest possible path to get there and this is how we reduce the wasted efforts you see when we're we're moving towards something that kpi at work or a goal that's important to us we can often let emotions bleed into how we move towards that that goal and that's what causes the clog of different tasks that are not really relevant to the goal or the extended timelines to get certain pieces of the project done so what's important is that we determine what the shortest possible path to the outcome is and then do those things it sounds very simple but you know let's say you're trying to start a business and you want to make three thousand dollars a month in that business that's the outcome you're working towards you could spend literally years doing market research and crafting your avatar and sourcing from suppliers and all this stuff and that's all fine if you want to take years to do it or you could have a prototype made and go out and talk to 10 people about hey would you buy this now what does that do it speeds up the the goal that you're going to to go towards you want to spend years developing the product just to see if you'll make that three thousand dollars a month at the end of those years probably not what's better is if you take a prototype out and you talk to people and you try to sell one of them that's the fastest path to getting a three thousand dollars a month and then guess what if you do that enough maybe over a couple months you'll get your first couple of sales you'll get your Revenue in you'll accomplish your goal of three thousand a month and now you have a lot of market research and actual real world testing so you have better information about version 2.0 of the product and how to Market it and you're in a sense you're you're failing faster and you're getting to your goal faster because you're just doing what it takes to go directly after the outcome which is three thousand dollars in Revenue per month as opposed to spending years preparing for going after that that objective so objective is number one defining that number two is to determine the shortest possible path to that objective and really get creative with that again if you're launching a business and your goal your objective is to create Revenue go directly for that Revenue don't waste your time thinking about Superfluous tasks or anything else or worrying about branding colors or you know all those other things if your goal is to learn a language you know Jump Right In go go hire the tutor to get you help don't think that you're going to trust yourself to to sit down and read that gigantic textbook on French that you're trying to learn because you're trying to learn French do what's fastest to get to your outcome because that creates momentum when you have momentum towards your your outcome things snowball and become even faster so step two determine the shortest possible path to your outcome step three is to schedule the needle moving activities this is where a lot of people fail to to execute when it comes to going towards a specific outcome that they're looking for so if you have let's say for example you have a report that you need to turn in for your job every single week and you know that you're most productive and get this report done fastest at 8am in the morning a few days before the report is due so it's not urgent you can actually schedule that in you can schedule that activity on your calendar at the beginning of the week and this half hour block at 8am I'm going to do this report because I know it'll get it done the fastest and I'll get it done early and I won't be stressed about it and that's what scheduling does for us it puts on the calendar our priorities it takes the most important needle moving actions that we can take and it puts them somewhere on our calendar so we actually do them throughout our week and those needle moving activities of course are the steps that we need to take on the shortest path towards our outcome right and if we put those needle moving activities on our calendar we're actually forcing ourselves to be efficient and not to waste time right we're we're telling ourselves at this particular time every single week or you know this um you know this Friday at 3 P.M I'm going to work on this and get this piece of the project move forward that tells us that that that forces us to move in a certain direction to the shortest possible path to our outcome as opposed to kind of guessing when we're going to do those most important tasks that move us towards the outcome that's important to us right so we're we have a direction we we have our shortest possible path to that that outcome we're looking for we've scheduled in our needle moving activities the last thing is just to let the rest follower it may uh let the let the rest of the the tasks and the moving pieces of our life kind of fall where they will you can only prioritize so much in your life you can't control everything what that means is when you do schedule those needle moving activities in your calendar there will by definition be things that probably get pushed out of the priority window and that's okay you know you might need to in in this process of moving quickly towards your outcome and and not wasting time you might need to let some things become a little bit of a mess and that's okay you know if you're used to responding to every email in your inbox within an hour it might be time to evaluate whether that's actually helping you that habit is helping you move towards your outcome whether that's the shortest possible path to your goal maybe you have to let things go a little bit in other areas so you can be really efficient with your time and schedule in those needle moving activities towards your outcome so let go of the control if that's a issue for you and let it be because I guarantee you when you take the time to set the objective to determine the shortest possible path to the objective and to schedule in those important needle moving activities in your week the rest of the stuff will fade away into the background anyway because you're so obsessed with moving forward towards your goal you won't care as much that these other little things are not getting done and you know that might be uncomfortable for for you right now if you've never done that before but sometimes we have to make sacrifices to move forward towards the things that are truly deeply important to us so I hope this has been helpful and and in framing a way to reduce the wasted effort in your life if you have any questions feel free to reach out please like And subscribe to this channel I would really appreciate that and until next time remember you're doing better than you think and you're worth more than you know