How to Prioritize Your Work

This week, I talk about the best productivity system ever developed and explain how you can use it too.

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Episode 185

Hello and welcome to episode 185 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

Many of you listening to this podcast, I am sure, are on a journey to discover the best time management and productivity system. Well, the truth is it’s already been developed. It’s used by the most incredibly productive people every day and it is possibly the simplest system you will ever use. 

You don’t need any special software or devices. You do not need a PhD and you could start using it today. 

And that is what I am going to tell you about today. How you can create it, use it and become unbelievably more productive than you are today.

But first… Right now I have a special offer on my time management and productivity courses. You can buy The Time Sector course, Your Digital Life 3.0 AND Productivity Masterclass courses for just $175.00. If you buy this bundle of courses this week, you will also get the Time And Life Mastery course as a free gift. Once this week ends, you will no longer qualify for the free gift.

So, if you want what I consider to be, the Ultimate Productivity bundle of courses including the Time And Life Mastery course, then you need to act now. This offer will be ending at the end of this week (that’s 13 June) 

I know you won’t be disappointed and I know these courses are all you need to develop your own system—a system that works for you. 

Okay, it’s time for me now to hand you over the Mystery Podcast voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Mike. Mike asks, Hi Carl, I know there are a lot of productivity and time management techniques and systems, but is there one that is better than all the others that most people don’t know about? 

Hi Mike, thank you for your intriguing question.

You are right there are a lot of time management and productivity systems around. I’ve tried most of them as well over the years. I say your question is “intriguing” because this is something I’ve never really understood about people and that is why so many want the most complex systems. Systems that take forever to manage and update every day and apps that demand constant and never-ending upkeep.

You see the worst productivity systems are those that take you away from doing your work. I suppose if you think about it that’s logical. The more time you spend updating, organising and playing around with a system, the less time you have for work. 

Now, when I was thinking about my answer to you, Mike, I considered naming the worst culprits for this but I decided that wouldn’t help and it would likely put a lot of people on the defensive. If I say something and you disagree with me, you will feel you must defend your choices and once you are defensive, I cannot help you. 

So, before we go any further, I want to ask you to open your mind. You see, when I tell you what the best productivity system for all of us is, I want you to have an open mind. If you go all defensive, you will not learn anything. You will defend your choices and that misses the point. We all make bad choices and we all think we are different and we need a uniquely different system to everyone else. The thing is we are not all different—we all get twenty-four hours—and the only thing we can do is decide what we need to do in those twenty-four hours. 

It’s those decisions where people go wrong. They choose the wrong activities. The most productive people you and I know make better decisions. That’s it. 

So, what is the best productivity system? 

It’s the Ivy Lee Method. Now, many of you may already have heard of the Ivy Lee method, but to give you a quick summary of how it was made famous. A gentleman in 1918, by the name of Ivy Lee, was asked by The Chairman of Bethlehem Steel, Charles Schwab, to come up with a method to increase the productivity performance of his executive team. 

Ivy Lee came up with a six-step process. That process is:

1. Decide what you want. Your goals and life purpose.
2. At the end of each day, take ten minutes to write out the six most important tasks you must complete the next day.
3. Prioritise your six tasks by importance
4. When you start the next day, begin at the top of your list and work you way down. Don’t move on to the next task until you have completed the previous one. 
5. If you do not manage to finish your six tasks, move any unfinished tasks to the next day.
6. Repeat the process. 

Now, the part people familiar with this method miss is the first step. You see, you need to know what your goals and purpose are. Without that, your choice of six tasks each day will not necessarily move your goals and objectives forward and you will gravitate to doing work for other people and not necessarily for yourself. 

Now, I don’t mean for you to be selfish here. What this means is answering the question: what is it that you want? Now it could be you want to be promoted to an executive position. You may want to start your own business or you may want to be financially independent by the time you reach fifty. 

You need to be very clear about these goals. 

Once you are clear on your goals, you can begin using this process. 

Now, I’ve developed a number of resources to help you here. Probably the best one is my FREE Areas of Focus Workbook that takes you through the process of developing your very own areas of focus. These are the things that are important to you. Once you know these and have developed a goal around each one, you are then ready to begin using the Ivy Lee method. 

So, why only six tasks?

One of our biggest problems is we are trying to do far too much each day. The reality is, you will always have far more to do than time available each day. That’s just a given. So, what you need to do is prioritise. That’s why the Ivy Lee Method is so effective. To use the method, you must relegate a lot of tasks that would normally be demanding your attention and you have to get ruthless about where you spend your limited time each day. 

Most people are not ruthless enough. Now, this is caused, in part, because we are natural people pleasers—we hate saying “no” to people and it’s in part because of FOMO—the Fear Of Missing Out—we worry that if we say “no” to something we are closing the door on an opportunity. The trouble is, we cannot and never will be able to take every opportunity that comes our way. If we are going to say yes to an opportunity, we will have to say “no” to a lot of other opportunities. 

In many ways, you have to trust your instincts. In my experience, it’s your instincts that will tell you whether an opportunity is right for you or not. 

I’ve studied people like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates for years and I’ve also studied the working habits of historical figures such as Winston Churchill, Earl Nightingale, Jim Rohn, Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford and all these people used the Ivy Lee method in some form or another.

They all know or knew where their priorities are or were and they did not allow themselves to be distracted by anything else. In a sense, they took this method to the extreme, but then, all these people got extreme results. 

Now you could continue down the same road you’ve been following, but before you do, ask yourself if you are getting the results you want. 

You see, you may indeed have the best-looking app, you may have well-organised notes or as is fashionably called today PKM system (that’s personal knowledge management system) but that does not mean you are getting the results you want. 

The results you want link straight back to the first step in the Ivy Lee Method. What do you want? If what you want is a cool set of productivity apps that gives you hours of entertainment organising and playing with the settings, then fantastic! But I suspect that’s not really what you want—well, I hope not. 

Most people want to get their projects completed on time without any fuss. They want to be on top of their work including their email and they want to enjoy a balanced personal and work life. This life is possible to achieve. But you will need to make the right kind of choices and those choices begin with…

What needs to be done today? 

Now, for those of you who have followed me for a while now, you know I advocate the 2+8 Prioritisation System. It’s really what Ivy Lee set out with his method but with a slightly larger number of tasks. 

With the 2+8 Method, you decide what two things must be done today and if you don’t do anything else all day, those two things will be done—even if you have to pull an all-nighter (although let’s hope that does not happen too often) The remaining eight tasks are the next most important tasks and you will do as many of those as you can. If you don’t complete them all, no problem, you just reschedule the remaining ones and repeat the process for the next day. 

Ultimately, what both Ivy Lee’s method and the 2+8 Prioritisation is about is prioritising your work. Understanding the difference between tasks that do get things done and tasks that pretend to get things done but don’t do much more than shuffle digital paper, and focusing all your time and attention to bigger, important work. 

That’s how all the super-successful people operate. They’ve been doing it for centuries. You can even trace this back to the thirteenth century and William of Ockham who popularised Ockham’s Razor—where the simple answer is usually always the best one. 

Ivy Lee’s Method is simple, anyone can use it and you do not need elaborate organisational systems or apps to use it. A simple piece of paper left on your desk would suffice—that’s how Bethlehem Steel’s executives used it back in 1918. 

Today, we have a lot of incredibly powerful applications that can do much of the hard work for us, but we need to be careful what we choose to use. We also must understand that no matter how much we would like to have a few extra hours each day you are never going to get them. Time is the part of this equation you are not going to change. Time is fixed. Time is also your most valuable asset and you cannot afford to be wasting it on low priority tasks that move you nowhere. 

The only variable you do have is your activity and that’s the variable where your ability to choose how you spend your time needs clear intentions. 

So, the answer to your question, Mike, is yes there is a best system. It beats all other systems and works 100% of the time. The only reason most people are not using it, is the same reason most people never learn about, or use, the Law of Attraction: It’s simple and we humans love complexity. We just cannot bring ourselves to accept that something so simple could have such a profound, positive effect on our lives. 

So while 97% of the world’s population will continue to complain about how much work they have to do and that they never have time to finish all the things they want to do, the remaining 3% will continue to use Ivy Lee’s Method and achieve amazing things. 

It’s your choice. Become ruthless about what you say yes to and have a clear set of goals and plans to achieve what you want out of life, or continue down the same path you are on right now with no clear plan or purpose and a personal productivity system that would challenge the abilities of even the smartest NASA scientists. 

Thank you for your question, Mike and thank you to you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.