By Carl Pullein

We all have too much to do and only 24 hours to do it. We cannot change the amount of available time; That’s fixed. We need to look at the other side of the equation — the stuff we have to do. It’s there where we do have some control.

One way we have tried to solve this problem is to use task managers. It makes sense — collect all the things you have to do in a list, and then start at the top and work your way down until you finish everything. Sounds great in theory, but in practice, this leads to overwhelm. It does not solve the underlying problem — too much to do, too little time to do it.

Perhaps, a solution.

Let’s step back. If we accept we cannot do everything, and we cannot change the amount of time we have, what can we do to resolve this problem?

The place to start is to know what is important. How do we do that? Here there is a hierarchy of things that are usually missed, yet, the most productive (and, by consequence, successful) people use this hierarchy every day to ensure the right things are being done. The less important are relegated to the “if I have time” category.

What is the hierarchy?

The hierarchy begins with your long-term vision of the life you want to live. This does not need to be a perfect, crystal clear vision, just some idea of how you would like to live your life. This will involve your career, your family life, the places you wish to visit, where you hope to live, and the hobbies you would like to do.

From this vision, you can extract insights into the person you want to be — or need to be — to accomplish the things you have visualised.

For example, if you visualise living in a home in the countryside, where you can go hiking in the hills every day, spend a few hours restoring an old Land Rover, and read the books you enjoy reading, you have something you can work with.

To be able to do this, there will be several things you need to do now. The first is to take care of your finances. You won’t live in a comfortable home in the countryside if you spend your income frivolously. You have to be saving a sufficient amount each month. Equally, you won’t be hiking anywhere if you neglect your health. Poor diets and a lack of exercise are among the most significant contributors to serious health issues later in life.

You may also decide to go to night school to learn car maintenance. Learning how to weld, rebuild engines and restore drive trains.

The vision of the life you want to live gives you the motivation and direction to develop your skills, abilities, and education, so you can live the life you intend to live.

Areas of Focus

Next comes our areas of focus — the important things to us: Family, friends, our career, finances, health and fitness, personal development, and our mission in life. If any of these areas become neglected, you will become anxious and stressed.

When you haven’t considered these critical areas of your life, you will react to events around you. It leaves you feeling unfulfilled and out of balance with the person you want to be.

When you take time to develop these areas, understanding what each one means to you and knowing what you need to do to keep things in balance, you find you have much more control over what happens to you.

The activities (tasks) that come from these areas are not time-consuming. For instance, in my family and relationships area, I have a task to call my parents every week and have an evening out with my friends and or family. Both are enjoyable activities that involve a few hours each week.

I have thirty minutes of learning each evening set aside for my self-development area. That could be reading a book, an article, or taking a course.

We are not talking hours each day spent working on your areas of focus. These are just a few simple habits that keep you in balance.

Having a vision of the life you want to live and knowing what your areas of focus mean to you ensures your daily actions align with your ideal self. It’s there that you develop a sense of achievement and happiness in what you are doing because you are aligned with the vision of how you would like to be.

Your Core Work

Your  core work is the work you are employed to do. Not the work you volunteered to do.

What often happens in our professional lives is we end up “volunteering’ for work we were not originally employed to do. For instance, if you are employed as a salesperson, your job is to sell your company’s products. It is not to sit in meetings with colleagues discussing the end-of-year party or solving other people’s problems.

One of the best things you can do is list all the activities that directly contribute to the results you are evaluated on. Sales is typically an easy one to do, as you will be evaluated on your sales performance and the relationship with your customers. So what can you do each day that will directly impact these results?

For me, writing these blog posts, recording my YouTube videos and podcast directly impacts the people I want to help. This means I ensure I have sufficient time to do my writing and recording when I plan my week. Only after I have scheduled my core activities in my calendar will I know how much time I have available for meetings and other commitments.

Everything else.

Once you have the activities that will move you towards your vision, keep your areas of focus in balance and ensure the work you are employed to do gets done, you will bring in everything else.

A lot of what drops into the “everything else” category is loud. It’s screaming, and it is demanding attention NOW. It’s challenging to ignore, so what do we do? We just do the task, hoping that things will quieten down once we do it and get it out of the way.

But that doesn’t happen, does it? Why? Because there will always be something screaming and shouting for your attention, and you cannot do them all. If you do, you neglect everything else that IS important — your long-term vision, your areas of focus and your core work.

Now, I can’t prescribe a magic pill to solve this for you. The only way to do this is to accept you will have to become uncomfortable. You will have to say: “No. I’m sorry, I cannot do that”.

If you are not prepared to become uncomfortable here, you will not grow. All growth, whether developing your sales, public speaking or parenting skills, will be uncomfortable initially. That’s the beauty of growth. You never grow by staying inside your comfort zone. You grow by pushing and expanding your comfort zone.

The great thing about comfort zones is they are not fixed. You can expand them at any time. You just have to be uncomfortable for a week or two as you push the barriers outward. For example, learning to say “no” will be uncomfortable initially, but you soon become comfortable with it with practice.

My advice is to stop trying to bend the laws of time — you cannot win that one. Instead, allow yourself some time to visualise the life you want to live, establish what your areas of focus are and get clear about your core work. Then, prioritise the tasks that drive these things forward, and you will find you are a lot less stressed, feel more in balance with your ideal self and get an incredible amount of worthwhile things done.

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