What To Do When There's Too Much To Do (2 page)

Frankly, doing more isn't always better. Would your manager be more impressed if you completed thirty-seven low-value tasks in one day, or just seven tasks with incredible impact? Can an eight-hour-a-day employee be more productive than a twelve-hour-a-day employee? You know the answers. What really matters is
results
—not check marks—and not hours. Busyness doesn't necessarily equal productivity, no matter how you slice it. No one really cares how many hours you were in the building or if you finished your to-do list.
People only care about what you're able to produce and the value of those results.

I wrote this book to help you achieve more
impactful
results, not necessarily
more
results. I also realize the irony of asking you to spend some of your precious time reading this book, given all you already have on your plate. But all worthwhile things take time to implement, so I urge you to consider this an investment toward greater time-savings in the future.

We'll focus on doing less and achieving more, not doing more with less—thus the subtitle, “Reduce Tasks, Increase Results, and Save 90 Minutes a Day.” The promise of this book is to be a hero at work and get a life at the same time. It's good for you, because your results will be stellar, and you'll achieve greater life balance. It's good for your employer, because you won't leave your company to search for a better life. Your satisfaction and morale will increase, and your employer's turnover will decrease.

Productivity is a win-win scenario!

Doing less will require a reset of your default “Go, Go, Go!” setting. Today's fast-paced, high-pressure environment often requires sixty, seventy, eighty, or more hours a week. But productivity tends to decrease as work hours increase; after all, how can you perform at your best when you're overworked and constantly tired? You'll make more mistakes and spend more time fixing them. You'll get further behind and run faster to stay in one place. It's a vicious, overwhelming cycle, and for many people, it seems impossible to break.

But buying this book proves you're determined to try. Just stop for a minute and ask yourself: “Do I
really
need to work so long and hard to get everything done … or is it possible I'm being inefficient?” When you take an honest look at your daily habits, workflow, and processes, you may discover there's a clog in your productivity.

What to Do When There's Too Much to Do
turns traditional time management on its head, because many old-fashioned techniques are meaningless for today's working professional.
When I started college in the late 1980s and attended my first time-management course, the instructor taught us to write down our schedules for the entire day, including the specific time we'd work on each task. I dutifully wrote up-to-the-minute agendas, detailing what I would do and when. From 8:00 to 8:30, I'll do this task. From 8:30 to 9:10, I'll do that task. Back then I could pretty much keep up with it, and my days usually went as planned. When something unexpected came up, it was fairly easy to adjust my agenda.

Then things started to change. Fax machines, voicemail, the Internet, e-mail, handhelds, apps, and all kinds of other technology exploded on the scene. The productivity game changed forever. Today, if you attempt to plan out every minute of your day, your schedule will blow up in the first five minutes.

With so much information and so much to do, it's become harder to be productive—and yet we feel busier than ever. With the recession, we're running lean and mean. We have greater expectations, fewer resources, and more work placed on us, which results in more time in the office and less time for life and loved ones.

Desperate workers are more stressed than ever before, as they receive information from multiple sources and attempt to track and organize it. We're constantly communicating with more people, more quickly, through more media, so we have more conversations to recall.

If you added up the amount of time it would take to complete the tasks on a typical person's to-do list, there might be hundreds of hours of work represented there. You can spend more time “planning” and “prioritizing” than just doing the work! Due to the blazing speed at which information flows, it's a waste of time to keep reordering a giant to-do list. Instead, organize your life around the stuff that really matters. Adopt a systematic workflow process to help you determine your high-value tasks, protect the time to do them, and focus on their execution.

If you've got far too much to do and desperately need to take back some of your time, know that it's possible to do so, assuming you're willing to put some sincere effort into the attempt. By following the logical, intuitive workflow process I present in this book, you can wrestle your schedule into submission. Ultimately, you can recover as much as ninety minutes of your day (or even more) to use as you see fit.

But before I launch into the details of this new and unique system, there are some people I'd like to acknowledge. I thank God for the gift of all these people in my life!

I want to thank my husband, John, who is my biggest fan and supporter. He puts up with my bizarre travel schedule and entrepreneurial lifestyle with understanding and cheerfulness. You have my undying gratitude and love.

Meagan, Johnny, and James, my children, I'm so proud to be your mom I could just burst.

Thanks to my incredible office manager, Becca Fletcher, my productivity weapon of choice. I am so fortunate to have you in my life and literally don't know what I'd do without you. Everyone needs a Becca!

I'm so grateful to Eileen Stack, my wonderful mother-in-law, who tirelessly helps our family and takes care of our children if both parents are out of town. Thank you for your unfailing love.

Mark and Darla Sanborn are great pals, and we have so much fun together. Spending time with you reminds me life's so much more than work!

I'm indebted to my mentor of eight years, Dianna Booher, CSP, CPAE, author of forty-five books, for the countless hours of time she's lovingly given me. I appreciate you introducing me to the team at Berrett-Koehler, who immediately believed in me and this book. Thanks to my editor, Neal Maillet, for your guidance throughout the project.

Thanks to my proofreader, Floyd Largent, for his eagle eyes and incredible editing skills.

I extend my heartfelt gratitude to our hundreds of clients, who have provided us the opportunity to work with you on the strategies in this book, learn from your feedback, see the results, and hear about your successes. Thanks for your enthusiastic support of my work.

I'm privileged to be the 2011–2012 president of the National Speakers Association. Over my nearly twenty years of membership, I've gained many wonderful friends, too many to mention by name, but you know who you are. Thank you for your encouragement, coaching, and camaraderie.

If you're serious about your career, then you've probably read a number of books about time management and productivity in an effort to make better use of your workday. So what's new about this one?
What to Do When There's Too Much to Do
is unique in its approach to workflow, and I think you'll find it a breath of fresh air in an overcrowded and increasingly redundant field. Simply stated, the central message is
it's better to do
less
, not more, so you can do better, more focused work.

Many workers find this a startling concept, because they increasingly have to work harder and longer with fewer resources—and that's precisely why my message is so very important. Over the last few decades we've learned to be superbly productive, yes, but in a way that can't be sustained over the long haul.

From a business perspective, productivity is the rate at which goods or services are produced per unit of labor. On a wider scale, this measure of corporate success is also a primary metric of the overall economic health of a nation. Collectively, we Americans are more productive today than at any time in our history.
¹
But just think about the factors motivating this productivity increase, especially in recent years. Many businesses have cut their staffs to the bone in an effort to save the bottom line; as a result, the truncated workforce must somehow do more with less, just like the woman who stopped me
before my presentation that day. We've defaulted to working long hours just so we can keep our jobs. And it's killing us.

In fact, I think we've just about hit the ceiling of what we can accomplish by stretching ourselves so thin we're practically transparent. Consider this worrisome factoid: According to a government report released in August 2011, American productivity declined for two consecutive quarters for the first time since 2008.
²
The second-quarter decline for 2011 was a bit less than expected: an annual adjusted rate of 0.7 percent rather than the anticipated 0.9 percent (yay?).
³
The bad news: 2011's first-quarter productivity figure, originally estimated at 1.8 percent growth, suffered a sharp downward revision to reflect an actual productivity
drop
of 0.6 percent.

Granted, we've experienced a minor economic expansion in the past few years. But the positive effects have been mostly limited to businesses, with very little trickle-down to individual workers. Indeed, as some observers have pointed out, many businesses posted productivity gains from early 2009 to late 2010
only
because they had previously cut costs. In the process they pared down their workforces, requiring the workers they retained to work longer hours—often for the same compensation.

This refusal to increase the average worker's pay even while forcing them to work harder may seem draconian, and in one sense it is. Workers know that there are plenty of people lined up to take their jobs if they complain too much about the pay and long hours, and many employers press this fact to their advantage.

But in a larger sense, the flat compensation growth just continues a trend visible in the statistics since 1980. According to a study released by the
New York Times
in September 2011, compensation grew steadily along with American productivity from 1949 until 1979, and then more or less flattened out—even as productivity skyrocketed.
⁴
Productivity rose 80 percent from 1979 to 2009; compensation increased just 8 percent. That contrasts sharply with increases of 119 percent and 100 percent, respectively, in the 30 previous years. Basically,
for the last three decades, American workers have been willing to accept insipid pay increases while pushing productivity through the roof.

But now we've hit the wall. As a class, we're exhausted, and any motivation to maximize productivity is mostly negative rather than positive. Recent economic growth may have been good for businesses, but it shortchanged the workers. We built on unstable economic ground … and now we're starting to see the cracks in the foundation. Even with high unemployment rates, employers complain about not being able to find competent workers.

So today, I preach the gospel of ruthless task reduction, because I honestly believe an abandonment of unnecessary chores, and a drastic triage of all that remains, is the only way to be consistently, profitably productive in this economy without destroying your health, your family life, and your joy.

Many workers think that a willingness to do whatever it takes, at the expense of all else, can cure any workplace ailment. Their employers, and society at large, have trained them to think this way. But they never seem to understand a salient point here: you don't have to kill yourself to prove your dedication to the company and produce the tremendous results required.

And I mean exactly that. The Japanese have an entrenched tradition of working superhuman amounts of unpaid overtime, more to demonstrate company loyalty than to enhance productivity. It also drives high levels of
karoshi
, the practice of literally working yourself to death. This problem isn't unique to Japan; Westerners have the same problem, though our medical establishment doesn't really keep tabs on it as such.

Is the possibility of a raise or promotion really worth risking your health? And let me emphasize the word “possibility” —after all, how can you ensure your hard work is even registering
with the higher-ups? You can't just try to outwork the other guy. Instead, get a handle on what's really important in your organization, and focus on aligning business strategy with your day-to-day execution. Don't just push and push and push until you can't go on anymore. Ironically, this can limit your usefulness to your company rather than increasing it.

Working too many hours is demonstrably counterproductive, because it results in decreased productivity. Studies have repeatedly shown that a sixty-hour workweek results, on average, in a 25 percent decrease in productivity.
⁵
The productivity numbers just get worse as the number of work hours increases, because exhaustion steadily erodes judgment and performance. Eventually, no matter how good your intentions, you hit a point of diminishing returns. If you go too far, your habits of overwork may harm your organization's bottom line—the exact opposite of what you intended when you set out on your quest to prove yourself.

The lesson here? You aren't a robot. Long hours lead to physical and mental fatigue, which results in slower work, more mistakes, and wasted time. It may also lead to depression, which can spiral out of control if left untreated—as is often the case, because the person affected is too busy to take care of it. Depression comes with harsh penalties of its own, and they can feed back into the productivity issues and make them even worse.

The old forty-hour workweek was originally struck as a compromise, as the best balance between productivity and overwork. Today, a forty-hour week isn't plausible for many people, given the expectations or structures of their jobs. Some people continue to insist they function better with a more demanding schedule. But they fail to recognize the signs of when they've reached capacity. Are you willing to do what it takes to short-circuit a drop in performance? You'd take good care of any other tool, wouldn't you? So why not take care of yourself?