I keep a sheet of paper pinned on a notice board on my wall. It looks quite innocuous. Quite insignificant. (I would also add incandescent, just to keep up the pattern, but I’m not quite sure what that means). And yet this piece of paper is my second biggest productivity tool! (The first one is always carrying around pen and paper)
If you looked at this mysterious sheet of paper on my wall, you would find it’s very simple. There’s a date for each day, followed by a few bullet points. The bullets points are my most important tasks for each day.
Most Important Tasks (aka Big Rocks)
Leo Babauta makes a great analogy in his article on Big Rocks. Your day is like a bucket. The big rocks represent the most important tasks in your life. But unless you’re careful, the bucket will quickly fill with sand and small pebbles (unimportant tasks), and you’ll find you can’t fit in your big rocks anymore. So you wait for the next bucket (next day). Yet somehow, you again end up filling it with sand and run out of space for the big rocks. It doesn’t help that other people are more than happy to help you fill your buckets with their own sand.
If you want the big rocks to fit, you will need to place them in your buckets well in advance, to make sure there’s enough space. You can then fit the sand around them.
And that’s exactly what my piece of paper on the wall does. I write down the most important tasks for each day. The tasks I simply WILL accomplish, no matter what. The tasks that will really make a lasting difference to my life. If, on some day, I finish my most important tasks, and then spend 8 hours straight playing computer games, I will go to bed happy. (ok, it’s not really possible to feel good after 8 hours of playing computer games, but you get the general idea.) Because I know I got the really important stuff done. Getting the life-changing stuff done in a few hours and wasting the rest of the day is better than doing mildly useful things all day long.
How to recognize the important tasks
Lots of tasks seem important, but once you pause to think about them, they’re just urgent. Like returning a DVD to the rental store on time. So what if you don’t return it today… just return it tomorrow and pay the late charge.
Or at school – I think understanding the stuff is important. Homework is merely urgent. So throughout school I often ignored homeworks. (And, at university, I still do. I often hand in a homework with only half the questions answered, with “boring” written next to the rest.) Some high school teachers used to hate me for treating homeworks how they deserve to be treated – as merely urgent, not important – and gave me some really bad marks during the year. Yet, in the final exams, I always got great marks, because I understood the subject.
So how do you recognize important tasks from the merely urgent? Here are a few helpful questions:
1. Will this matter 5 years from now?
If something will have lasting positive effect on your life even 5 years from now, it’s probably important. And if it won’t, it’s probably not that important. (cumulative things, noted in number 3. below, are an exception.)
2. If I accomplish this today, will I go to sleep happy and content?
I often delay important decisions (like booking airplane tickets) for days or even weeks. Then, once I finally get off my lazy butt and actually do them, I suddenly feel so free. Like a big weight has been lifted off my chest. So learn from my mistakes. Schedule your important tasks in as soon as possible, and get them done. You’ll be going to bed every day with a sense of accomplishment and happiness.
3. Is this cumulative?
It might not seem like a big deal to skip one exercise session. Or to sleep late one day when you’re trying to switch to waking up early. But every time you skip your habit, it makes the subsequent days harder to maintain.
Conversely, it might not seem like a big deal to give a small speech in front of 20 acquaintances. But the confidence and experience you get from it will carry along with you. You will feel more confident and comfortable with public speaking EVERY SINGLE TIME after that. It’s like compound interest – every little bit matters, because it builds on itself forever after.
What you can do RIGHT NOW
Want to get started immediately? After all, every day you delay doing important things, you miss the compound interest!
The easiest way to get started is to grab a pen and a piece of paper. Then just spend a few minutes thinking about important tasks in your life you’ve been delaying. Or even come up with new tasks you haven’t thought of. Maybe you could call or e-mail someone with a business offer. Maybe there’s a book you’ve wanted to read for a long time. Maybe there’s a hobby you’ve always wanted to try out… and all you need to do is a quick google search to find a local club!
Only you know what are the really important things to you. So take a few moments to figure it out. Then write down when, within the next 7 days, you’re going to accomplish all the things you came up with. You won’t believe how fast you can transform your life if you make sure you get done the truly important tasks.
Cheers, and good luck!
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