They say that we can be most productive not by getting more done but by picking the few best things to do. But how to choose which are the best few? When our days are packed with meetings and emails, texts and to dos, it’s hard to get a handle on what is best to do. And we end up defaulting to whatever is recent (all those fresh emails!) or the urgent (all those people jumping up and down for our attention).
Instead, let’s maintain an inventory of all we could do. We can fill it to the brim with everything we might need to do something about sooner or later. Dump it all in, at any time. We then organize the inventory into things we may do but not soon, things we will do as soon as possible, things we need to file for later reference, and things we will do on or by a certain date. The rest gets tossed. We clean the inventory daily to keep it fresh. We do a deeper refresh of the inventory weekly to stay strategic.
With our inventory in place, we get to engage a very clever and oft-forgotten part of our minds. This part turns out to be excellent at picking from such an inventory the very best, most important thing to do next.
In your corner,
Mike
PS: To build such and inventory, start here or here and here.