What To Do When There's Too Much To Do (3 page)

In the next six chapters, I'll show you how to train yourself out of the overwork mentality.
Reduce, reduce, reduce
will become your new mantra, to the tune of about ninety minutes a day. This ninety-minute savings isn't a “guess”—it's what clients have told me these methods have saved them. Take for example the testimonial I received from Montague L. Boyd, CFP, Senior Vice President of Investments at UBS Financial Services:

Prior to Ms. Stack's training, we customarily had employees who stayed into the early evening hours in order to finish or just keep up with our workload. Ms. Stack spent a day with us and then three or four months later a second day. Ms. Stack worked with us to develop more efficient methods of intra-office communications. Ms. Stack also showed us how to prioritize daily items and to keep track of them. She showed us how to use Microsoft Outlook properly. There are far too many details to recount here; they made a huge difference. Now we regularly find that we can finish our work every day with time to spare. We operate with much less confusion and rarely if ever worry about those items that may “drop through the cracks”! They just don't. There are six investment partners. We have a partner in charge of our Retirement Plan group and a Research partner. We operate smoothly now and communicate effectively in much less time. My estimate is that each of us saves about ninety minutes per day compared to our systems before Laura Stack. Six support staff went from a state of confused, stressed, and long hours to an efficient team. They finish most days well before “quitting time” and go home on time every night. Nobody has stayed late in months. Ms. Stack has lived up to her title as “The Productivity Pro.” She has shown us a path to accomplish more—much more—in fewer hours. Our staff believes
they can take us through exponential growth with very little need for additional manpower. All of this extra time gives us the opportunity to think and find other ways to improve our business plan for greater success.

In the same way I helped his team, I will show you how to logically reprioritize your work and shift your focus to the truly significant. You'll learn to jettison old ideas that limit your productivity and begin re-examining your workload with new eyes. You'll excise useless tasks and cut through redundant data to sharpen your focus to a keen edge.

Instead of accepting your fate and allowing it to overwhelm you, step up and take your future in your own hands—and do what's necessary to achieve a work-life balance that you can manage indefinitely. Unlearn the mistaken beliefs that serve as obstacles to productivity. Recognize your limits, trim away the fat, and adjust your attitude until you can plainly see that the
real
issue here is discovering what you can reasonably accomplish within the time available. If you do all this, you'll eventually come to realize that there really
is
time enough in the day to do everything that matters.

With the new system I offer you, it's simple to rearrange your life so you can
have
a life outside of work. Not necessarily easy, mind you—but simple and straightforward to implement. With that in mind, I'd like to introduce the Productivity Workflow Formula™.

The PWF breaks down into six primary steps:

1. Determine what to do.
Study your work requirements closely; triage your to-do lists; handle time-wasters; and decide to do only what really matters.

2. Schedule time to do it.
Assign time slots and durations
appropriately; say no when appropriate; make decisions quickly; and control your meetings.

3. Focus your attention.
Hone your concentration to razor sharpness; shut out distractions; learn focus techniques; and avoid multitasking.

4. Process new information.
Research effectively; file digital information; and quickly handle incoming e-mail, voicemail, and paper.

5. Close the loop.
Determine what does and doesn't work; reduce inefficiencies; solve people problems and bottlenecks; and tighten up systems as you go.

6. Manage your capacity.
Focus on the physical factors affecting your energy; manage sleep, diet, exercise, and your own happiness.

Graphically, the PWF looks like this:

The model is circular by design, which suggests continuity, as well as a process that can (and should) be repeated again and again. In other words, you get into a continuum and don't have to leave it; it just becomes part of your life. Plus, instead of thinking of productivity as a straight line from A to B (followed by … nothing) it becomes its own self-fulfilling prophecy. Each improvement gets you to a new place, instead of to some plateau you never leave again.

THE PRODUCTIVITY WORKFLOW FORMULA™ (PWF)
Determine + Schedule + Focus +
Process + Close + Manage = PRODUCE

If you incorporate the PWF into your life, you really can save yourself ninety minutes a day that you can use to live your life, instead of working it away. This may sound odd if you feel shackled to your desk now, but it really
is
possible to get more done while doing less work. You just need to separate the valuable wheat from the nonproductive chaff.

So let's take a look at how you can become more efficient, step by logical step.

Demo version limitation

In the first step of the Productivity Workflow Formula, we worked on reducing your to-do lists. After you've eliminated time-wasting behaviors and determined exactly what you should do each day, the second step is finding the time to do it—literally—on your calendar. This will require you to structure your schedule very carefully to ensure maximum productivity. Among other things, schedule your tasks effectively, say no when appropriate, and control your meetings—whatever's necessary to efficiently use your time.

After all, time isn't like money, office supplies, or Brussels sprouts. We've each got a very limited amount of it, and we're not going to get any more. In fact, what we call time management isn't “time” management at all. Since everyone has precisely the same amount of time (lacking that spiffy little device Hermione Granger used in the Harry Potter books to take more than one class at once), time management is better regarded as
self
-management. Your management of time is based largely on your willingness to stop
misusing
time—thereby eliminating those things hindering your productivity and protecting your time from those who want a piece of it.

Let's look at a few ways you can further tighten up your time-use habits by creating
new
behaviors to complete your important tasks.

Back in 2007, Timothy Ferriss created a sensation in the business world with his provocatively titled book
The 4-Hour Workweek
. In it, he outlined his philosophy, which I'll paraphrase: Once you've worked hard to build your business, it's possible to maintain it at a profitable level by working just a few hours per week.

Ferriss believes the rules that bind us to the 9-to-5 grind are a pointless legacy of a time long past, because in the modern knowledge economy, what matters isn't how many hours you work—it's how well you perform. Furthermore, he asserts, it doesn't matter how much money you make if you don't have the time to enjoy it.

Using his personal example, Ferriss outlines a method of ruthless time management using (among other things) the 80/20 principle, extreme outsourcing, and what he calls “cultivating selective ignorance”—that is,
not
trying to constantly keep up with every little thing at all times. Instead, he suggests, just catch up whenever it's necessary to do so. This allows you to narrow your focus to the critical few items that really matter, so you can cut your workweek to a length that seems ridiculously short to many of us.

All this seems to work for Tim Ferriss— but can it work for you? Is a 4-Hour Workweek
really
possible? The answer is … well, kinda.

I'm with Ferriss on the basics. I've founded my entire business on teaching people how to cut out the extraneous and develop better time-management skills to boost efficiency. I agree wholeheartedly that it's an excellent idea to delegate and/or outsource everything except the few tasks that are the most profitable and valuable to you. As you'll see at some length in the next chapter, I'm all for the process of selective ignorance (i.e., eliminating distractions and interruptions).

Certainly, all these things can help you decrease your work load, especially when you apply them as rigorously as Ferriss
apparently does. But does he
really
have a 4-Hour Workweek? I doubt it. First of all, the title of his book is clearly a catchy exaggeration, intended to drive sales. And Ferriss appears, in fact, to work much more than four hours a week, not just in promoting his books, but in maintaining his business interests and a blog.

But however long his workweek is, Ferriss's construct works for him because he has redefined the concept of work. In the context of the 4-Hour Workweek, work is
anything you don't like doing
. Sounds like a great excuse for workaholism, because this definition means anything productive and profitable you enjoy doesn't count as work—no matter how long or hard you work at it. Some observers consider this specious reasoning; to them, work is work, even when it's fun—because no matter what, it takes time, effort, and focus. Others point out that if you're not your own boss, this concept doesn't really apply; you have to fulfill the requirements of your job description, like it or not.

I can see their points, but I can see Ferriss's as well. In fact, one lesson I think we can take away from
The 4-Hour Workweek
is this: if you truly want to maximize your productivity, you have to enjoy what you do. So yes, go ahead and use his methods (and others) to pare your work life down to its essentials, the critical few things all of us time-management gurus tell you to focus on. Then look at them critically; if you don't love them already,
learn
to love them—or change careers. There's nothing as soul-crushing as grinding your way through a job you don't like.

The concept of the 4-Hour Workweek is a valuable one, but, like so many other business concepts, it only works under specific conditions. Ferriss had already built his existing business to steady profitability before he was able to abandon his eighty-hour workweeks for so-called four-hour ones. So this is a maintenance concept; if you're an entrepreneur who's still building your business, don't expect to work four hours a week. Of course, if you work for someone else, don't expect them to respond well to the concept (that sentence actually made me laugh aloud while writing).

If you don't already, learn to love what you do—or change careers. You can't maximize your productivity if you don't enjoy your work.