When stuff comes in, you can’t do it ALL as soon as it arrives, so what’s the best process?
I’d like to suggest a series of filters, as follows:
- Can you say no to it? If it doesn’t contribute to your enjoyment or achievement then maybe it’s got to go into the bin??
- OK, so you’ve got to do it – can you delegate it to someone else? This might mean paying someone to do it. But at least the person doing it isn’t YOU!
- OK so nobody else can do it, it’s got to be you. But can you negotiate to only do part of it, to get some help with it, to get paid for it, to do it later or less well?
- OK so you have to do all of it, yourself. If it’s less than 2 minutes, do it right now. And if it’s larger than that, and you have the time, you can also do it right now.
- If it’s urgent and not large, but you don’t have time to do it right now, add it to your daily jobs to do list.
- If you aren’t going to have time to do it today, but it is time limited, put it into your diary, allocating a chunk of time.
- If it’s large and not time-limited, i.e. it’s just a big job that needs doing some time, add it to your master list of all jobs to be done.
- Finally if you’re not sure if you’ll EVER do it, but you might, at least you don’t want to ditch it right now and forget it, you can add it to your ‘Maybe Someday‘ list….
Doing this should mean that you keep on top of everything that’s coming in. The small stuff gets done straight away, the irrelevant stuff gets ditched, and the big stuff gets remembered and dealt with later at some point.
onwards and upwards!
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