Crushing Busyness – Part 3 – Do Less Stuff

How much of what you do in a day is effective? All of us have daily tasks, meetings, habits, calls, etc., that aren’t moving the ball forward. Part of crushing busyness is getting rid of these things.

Let’s try an experiment; look at your calendar over the last two weeks. Review every entry. How many of those entries did not have an impact on moving you toward your goals? Now, look at your to-do list the same way. Those are the things to avoid this week.

Consider the stuff that isn’t on the calendar. How long does it take you to grab coffee? When you are getting coffee do you get caught up talking to someone and burn 10-minutes? Was that conversation valuable enough to spend 10-minutes of your day? Was it worthy enough to work 10-minutes later to make up for the work you missed during that chat?

10-minutes seems like no big deal, but is it? Let’s assume you get caught just once a day in one of these 10-minute chats. Now, multiply that by five work days a week. Multiply that by 48 weeks a year (assuming you have a little vacation and holidays off). That’s 2,400 minutes, which is 40 hours, which is an entire week of work! One “quick” 10-minute chat a day burns a week of productive work per year.

It’s these moments, large and small, that steal our time before we even realize it. These are the moments we must watch for and take back to crush the busyness in our live.

Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash