Stop filling your day with Unimportant tasks
This is one of the common procrastination methods employed by our minds to avoid some important tasks. We create an illusion of business all day looking into unimportant tasks, secretly procrastinating important ones. We use this business as an excuse for our procrastination. This is quite common in corporate culture with myself being no excuse for this.
“Doing unimportant task well does not make it important “ — Tim Ferris
I became aware of my unconscious behavior after reading “The 4 hour work week book”. It is an eye-opener.
I attended all the meetings booked in my calendar, checked emails 40 to 50 times a day, and responded to every buzz in teams. Because time gets wasted on these unimportant tasks, important tasks which fill the primary description of my job took a back seat all the time. Or in the most honest way, I was attending to all these tasks procrastinating main tasks.
This is like a chain reaction,
seeing the backlog of important tasks → Feels stressful → feels worthless → makes me feel am in the wrong place → Agitated
Not just me, I believe most of us do this. This is very common in the IT sector where I work. This article is written to bring awareness, and also to give few tips which helped me to overcome this issue.
Why do we do this?
Let’s understand the “Why”. This will help us to know ourselves better. May be few of these questions can help us to find the answer:
- Is your current work not challenging enough?
- Do you have the urge to answer something buzzing your communicator?
- Is your perfection stopping you from making progress?
Reasons are endless. Before we jump to solutions what is most important is being honest with ourselves and knowing our Why. In my case, I had all 3 of them.
Honestly, even changing jobs won't fix this problem unless we learn to know our priorities. Below are some methods which helped me to get on to my priorities.
3 Useful tips which I learned from the book worked like a charm for me.
- Write down what is real work for your role
I asked these questions to myself
Why am I hired in first place?
What should be my ideal daily task?
What will make me satisfied in my current role?
Use these questions to identify few things which matter in your role. Write the task for the next day the previous evening. Before the craziness of the day starts, work on the task which has to be focused on, the task which matters. I close my day by writing priorities for the next day.
2. Stick it and make it visible
If there are a lot of distractions at work, write a priority in a Post-it note and stick it somewhere clearly visible. This is to remind you to get back on track whenever you are distracted. I wrote it in a notebook and the notebook was visible to me all the time.
3. Time Email checking to just 3 times a day
If you are someone who checks your email multiple times out of a habit, close outlook or mailbox. Check mail at 10.00 am 1.00 pm and 4.30 pm. Before checking mail for the day, focus on your priorities first. This is a game-changer. Once I closed the mailbox, I don’t have the urge to check it often. Out of sight, out of mind.
I know I mentioned 3 tips, but here is the final punch “Allow yourself to finish the work early”. If you are smarter than others by finishing an hour's of work in 10 mins, accept it. Don’t be hard on yourselves. Because your work time is from 9 to 5, you don’t have to sit in front of the laptop to check emails/chat.
