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You are here: Home / Archives for 1 - Productivity / e Plan (Review & Reduce) / Prioritizing

How Leaders Accomplish More by Doing Less

July 22, 2016 by whatsbestnext

A remarkably high number of new executives fail within their first 18 months, and it’s not because they were promoted above their skill set. Often it’s because they keep filling their schedules with the tasks they did well in their previous role instead of leading.

What does it look like to lead productively?

Matt Perman helps you think through your leadership priorities and develop strategies to succeed.

Download the free article “How Leaders Accomplish More By Doing Less.”

Filed Under: 3 - Leadership, 4 - Management, Prioritizing

4 Principles for Setting the Right Priorities

February 5, 2014 by Matt Perman

From Peter Drucker in The Effective Executive:

  • Pick the future against the past;
  • Focus on opportunities rather than on problems;
  • Choose your own direction, rather than climb on the bandwagon; and
  • Aim high, aim for something that will make a difference, rather than for something that is “safe” and easy to do.

Filed Under: Decision Making, Prioritizing

Priority Management Tips

August 28, 2011 by Matt Perman

Dave Kraft has a very helpful article on Priority Management Tips (pdf) that gives some helpful points on managing to-do lists well.

Update: I’m not able to get the direct link to the pdf to work, but if you scroll down on this page, you will find it about half way down. While you’re there, note that there is a lot of other helpful content worth taking a look at!

Filed Under: Prioritizing

Beware of Performance Load

January 28, 2011 by Matt Perman

Being competent is a good thing, but you need to be aware of one danger: “If not controlled, work will flow to the competent man until he submerges” (Charles Boyle). So if you aren’t deliberate about it, your competence can actually be your undoing.

This is the issue of performance load. Here’s how Josh Kaufman explains it in The Personal MBA:

Being busy is better than being bored, but it’s possible to be too busy for your own good.

Performance load is a concept that explains what happens when you have too many things to do. Above a certain point, the more tasks a person has to do, the more their performance on all of those tasks decreases.

Imagine juggling bowling pins. If you’re skilled, you may be able to juggle three or four without making a mistake. The more pins that must be juggled at once, the more likely you are to make a mistake and drop them all.

If you want to be productive, you must set limits. Juggling hundreds of active tasks across scores of projects is not sustainable: you’re risking failure, subpar work, and burnout. Remember Parkinson’s Law: if you don’t set a limit on your available time, your work will expand to fill it all.

Part of setting limits means “preserving unscheduled time to respond to new inputs.” This is necessary to handle the unexpected. And this means we must recognize that downtime is not wasteful. Kaufman goes on:

The default mind-set of many modern businesses is that “downtime” is inefficient and wasteful — workers should be busy all the time. Unfortunately, this philosophy ignores the necessity of handling unexpected events, which always occur. Everyone only has so many hours in a day, and if your agenda is constantly booked solid, it’ll always be difficult to keep up with new and unexpected demands on your time and energy.

Schedule yourself (in terms of appointments and projects) at no more than 80% capacity. Leave time to handle the unexpected. And to enable yourself to do this, realize that, counterintuitively, people (and systems — this is true of highways, airports, and all sorts of things) become less efficient when operating at full capacity, not more, and that downtime can actually increase productivity. If you keep these things in mind, you can help prevent your competence from being your undoing.

Filed Under: Prioritizing, Scheduling

Making Room for the New Means Getting Rid of the Old

December 10, 2010 by Matt Perman

From David Allen’s latest newsletter (which you can subscribe to here):

It’s time to purge.

The end of a year and start of the new is a great metaphorical event you can use to enhance a critical aspect of your constructive creativity—get rid of everything that you can.

Your psyche has a certain quota of open loops and incompletions that it can tolerate, and it will unconsciously block the engagement with new material if it has reached its limit. Release some memory.

Want more business? Get rid of all the old energy in the business you’ve done. Are there any open loops left with any of your clients? Any agreements or disagreements that have not been completed or resolved? Any agendas and communications that need to be expressed? Clean the slate.

Want more clothes? Go through your closets and storage areas and cart to your local donation center everything that you haven’t worn in the last 24 months. And anything that doesn’t feel or look just right when you wear it.

Want to be freer to go where you want to, when you want to, with new transportation? Clean out your glove compartments and trunks of your cars. And for heaven’s sake, get those little things fixed on your car or bicycle or motorbike that have been bugging you. . . .

You will have to do all this anyway, sometime. Right now don’t worry about the new. It’s coming toward you at lightning speed, no matter what. Just get the decks clear so you’re really ready to rock ‘n’ roll.

Filed Under: Prioritizing

Why We Do Too Much

February 9, 2010 by Matt Perman

From Andy Stanley in Next Generation Leader: 5 Essentials for Those Who Will Shape the Future:

The primary reason we do too much is that we have never taken the time to discover the portion of what we do that makes the biggest difference.

Filed Under: Prioritizing, Strengths

The Action-Priority Matrix

March 8, 2009 by Matt Perman

Mindtools has a good overview of the Action-Priority Matrix.

The Action Priority Matrix is a simple diagramming technique that helps you choose which activities to prioritize (and which ones you should drop) if you want to make the most of your time and opportunities.

It’s useful because most of us have many more activities on our “wish lists” — whether these are bright ideas to pursue, exciting opportunities or interesting possibilities — than we have time available. By choosing activities intelligently, you can make the very most of your time and opportunities.

You unfortunately have to register to read the whole thing (What’s Not Best!), but you still get to see the four quadrants, which are:

  1. High impact, low effort: Quick wins
  2. Low impact, low effort: Fill-ins
  3. High impact, high effort: Major projects
  4. Low impact, high effort: Hard slogs (now called “thankless tasks” in the article, but I like “hard slogs” much better)

Filed Under: Prioritizing

About

What’s Best Next exists to help you achieve greater impact with your time and energy — and in a gospel-centered way.

We help you do work that changes the world. We believe this is possible when you reflect the gospel in your work. So here you’ll find resources and training to help you lead, create, and get things done. To do work that matters, and do it better — for the glory of God and flourishing of society.

We call it gospel-driven productivity, and it’s the path to finding the deepest possible meaning in your work and the path to greatest effectiveness.

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About Matt Perman

Matt Perman started What’s Best Next in 2008 as a blog on God-centered productivity. It has now become an organization dedicated to helping you do work that matters.

Matt is the author of What’s Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done and a frequent speaker on leadership and productivity from a gospel-driven perspective. He has led the website teams at Desiring God and Made to Flourish, and is now director of career development at The King’s College NYC. He lives in Manhattan.

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