No, there is no mistake with the title. I really meant it!
I can’t start before go through some facts that are becoming cliches nowadays. Yep, you already saw how things are moving faster. You are already suffering a type of suffocation in this ocean of information. Your inbox became impossible to manage. Long ago!
You just cannot keep up with the amount of things to do. Ok, I will make one question knowing the answer: Does it ring a bell? Does it sound familiar?
Calm down. There is a solution for this craziness.
Have you ever heard about Pareto? Back in 1906, an Italian economist named Vilfredo Pareto noted after a series of studies that there is a natural phenomenon where 80% of the results come from 20% of the resources.
Some of the events he observed was that 80% of the Italian land was owned by 20% of the population or that 80% of the peas in his garden came from 20% of his pea plants. Of course, his studies evaluated a significant set of situations and this principle was a constant in practically all of them. This 80/20 principle has been known as “Pareto principle”.
It is important to bear in mind that the “80/20” represent a principle, which means that the proportions can vary and it is still valid when we see relations like 70/30, 85/15 and so on.
And what is the relation between this principle and your problem managing your endless amount of tasks? Before answer this question, let’s have a look in other scenarios where the Pareto principle is visibly present:
80% of a project is normally achieved with 20% of the effort
80% of work is usually done by 20% of the team members
80% of the customers use only of the 20% of the software features
And the list goes on and on
Without enter in any sort of details, I will affirm with a massive amount of confidence that:
“20% of your actions will generate 80% of the results you need.”
Yes, if you focus in 20% of what you need to do, you will achieve at least 80% of what needs to be delivered! Between you and me, when we look to our “To do List” we always find plenty (PLENTY!) of things that: 1) Are not urgent, 2) Are not important, 3) Can be done by someone else or 4) Can simply be ignored!
We can quickly find dozens of examples in our professional and personal lives of ‘not urgent’ or ‘not important’ tasks that keep taking our time. Either by our own choice (Yes, our-own-choices!) or imposed by someone else, like your boss.
For example, a PMO in a quite large company used to have weekly project meetings to talk about issues and critical topics of a project and then, send the status to the stakeholders. Nothing wrong, right? But each meeting used to have at least an hour, with the attendance of the entire project team, plus other (not always correctly identified) stakeholders. Surely less frequent meetings with only the core and key people can have the same result demanding much less effort from the team. Instead of 10 or sometimes 15 people attending the meeting, you can have the same results with 4 or 5.
So, now it is just a matter to go to your “to do list”, grab 20% of the actions and you will be OK? Well, sorry, but it is not exactly like that. There is a small catch: Prioritisation.
The very first thing you need to do is to organise your action by priority. I don’t want to dictate how you need to define the priority of each action, but one suggestion is to create a list where you have one column defining the urgency (from 0, the least urgent, to 5, the most urgent) and another column defining the importance. Then a third column named “Severity”, which can be a multiplication of urgency and importance. This column will define which actions you manage first. Needless to say how important is the correct and meaningful definition of the parameters.
You can easily and quickly create such list using your Excel and start using it straightaway.And like any new habit, it can take some time until you get used to update this list. At least twice a week should be enough to start.
And now the most important part of the advice: DO NOT SUFFER with the bottom of the list!!! Like magic, you will start seeing that several actions will simply be eliminated because in the end of the day they were not necessary or other people took care of it.
And what to do with the time you will save? Catch up that never ending inbox for sure. And why not make that call you have been delaying for months for that old friend? Or finally manage to watch that webinar, read a nice book or, even better, go for a quick jogging around the block?
Ok, first action now is: Create your list and start using it TODAY! I promise you will do less and achieve much more! Thanks to Mr Pareto!!
And if you have more time, do not miss the article called “Small actions, big difference!”
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