The Power of Doing Less by O'connell Fergus;

Author:O'connell, Fergus;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated
Published: 2013-08-26T00:00:00+00:00

Okay, so you're making a conscious effort to just do the right stuff. But there's still more you can do to tighten your focus onto only doing the things that truly matter.

There will be some stuff on your wildly important list that will clearly always be there. In my project management business, for example, I have just two priorities – in the order shown:

1 Delivering services to existing customers.

2 Bringing in new business.

These are never going to change as long as I continue to do this job. And it wouldn't make sense for either of them to be dropped from my list. These will always be my wildly important things. And you will have similar things on your list that are no-brainers.

But there may be other things on your list that you're not so sure about. You suspect that even though they might seem important, they may not be: you're not convinced. Your theory is that they don't really add value and are not a good use of your time. Or it may be that your boss, for example, has decided that everything you do is wildly important.

In either of these cases, here's what you can do. You want to test your theory. You want to prove for once and for all, whether something is wildly important or not.

The only way you can truly test whether something is wildly important is to not do it – and see what happens. If the sky falls, then clearly it was important. If it doesn't, then it wasn't. So here are some ways you can do that.

Start with the things that have the lowest priority on your list. Let's say that there's a meeting you go to every week and you're not convinced that attendance there is a good use of your time. Now let's be clear, I'm not saying that all meetings are a waste of time. Some meetings are immensely useful, solve problems, move projects forward, take decisive action and so on. But I think I'd have to say that, in my own experience, about 80% of the meetings I've been to over the course of my life have been a complete and utter waste of time. But maybe that's just me.

Also, let's be equally clear – the reason we're proposing to opt out of this meeting is not so that we can simply skive off. It's that we think the meeting is not a good use of our precious time and that we're proposing to reinvest that time into something more useful and important.

Anyway, back to your meeting. If you think the meeting might not be a good use of your time, then don't go. Notice too that there are many ways not to go to a meeting:

The absolutely best way is to say you won't be able to attend because you're doing this other, more important thing instead. (And you could ask if somebody could take notes on your behalf.)

Another good way is to be upfront and have a

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