June 2, 2010
Think of the word Responsible. It really means response-able—you are able and willing to respond to requests and needs sent your way. It implies being willing to take on activities and get them done. For years it has been the mark of a good worker.
However, there is a new reality these days in most businesses, particularly with all the business e-mail we get, and it’s this: these days you will never get it all done. You will never be able to fully respond to—to fulfill—all the requests you get. With e-mail delivering tens of important new requests each day, you just can’t do it all.
That may seem obvious, but it leads to a hugely important fact at work: you can no longer just approach work responsibly. Merely being responsible—being willing to respond to things as they are asked of you—just won’t work anymore. It is not sufficient; you’ll end up behind and overwhelmed. Rather, you now need to also approach work with strategy.
What Strategy?
Clearly, one main strategy is to focus on your important work first so that only your lowest priority items fall by the side. By important, I mean those activities that accomplish your major work goals for the week or month.
That too may seem obvious; however, most of us find we cannot do that. Why? We usually find we have too many urgent activities that are distracting us from our main goal work. Our boss has emergencies, our client has emergencies—and we have our own emergencies—we have piles of late and overdue tasks all bogging us down.
Don’t beat yourself up (or your staff); this is natural. Too much urgency is a logical outcome of too many requests coming in each week. Think about it. When our list of requests exceeds our time to get them done, many of those tasks become late. And when they are very late, they become urgent. Soon we are doing nothing but fighting urgencies. The trouble is, when that happens, we get frazzled, and then every task starts to look urgent—even when they are not. We pounce on whatever is in front of us, and we then descend into an undifferentiated mass of overwhelming work.
Managing Urgency
So, I say, these days, the first skill to learn is to manage this overabundance of urgency. It is now a fact of life so you need a system to manage it—to prevent it from derailing your important work.
And that’s what the Workday Mastery To-Do List is. It’s a simple tool to systematically sort out your urgencies and clearly reveal which are truly needy and which are not. It allows you to see which items need high-intensity urgent attention and which you can manage more comfortably. Ultimately, because it controls urgency, it gives you the clarity to focus on your most important, less-urgent, work. It allows you to make the goal-based progress you so desperately want. Implementing this simple to-do list takes you beyond just being responsible and to being a truly strategic worker.
So, if you have not yet done so, start using the Workday Mastery To-Do List today. Chapter 2 of my book Master Your Workday Now! gets you quickly started. And don’t forget, there is also my 7-minute video to help put it in place quickly. And finally, my Outlook book shows you how to create the Workday Mastery To-Do List in Outlook.
