Why Do Tasks Don't Get Done

This week, what stops you from doing a weekly planning session, and how to make sure you are doing one every week.

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Episode 190 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 190 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.

I’ve recently received a number of questions on weekly planning sessions and how to overcome the fear and dread of seeing all those incomplete tasks. I answered those questions individually, but I realised that my answer to these questions needs a wider audience because I know so many of you are not looking at these sessions in the right way. 

Now before we get to the question, I should point out that the weekly planning session I will talk about in this episode is the Time Sector System planning session, and not the GTD (Getting Things Done one) although I will refer to the differences. 

The TIme Sector System’s planning sessions are simple, quick, and are more focused on what you are going to do next week, rather than reviewing what you have and have not done this week. 

And of course, if you have not joined the Time Sector Course yet, now would be a good time to do so. The course is at a very low price of $49.99 (that is four times cheaper than an equivalent course) and will give you a time management system designed in the 21st century for the way we work today. 

There’s enough complexity in the world as it is, the Time Sector System keeps thing simple and focuses your attention on what needs to be done now, and not what may or may not happen in two weeks or two months time.

Full details of the course are in the show notes. 

Okay, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question

This week’s question comes from Dodge. Dodge asks: Hi Carl, I think many avoid the planning session because it can be discouraging to have to face unfinished tasks from the week before and stressful to realize you have more you need to do in the upcoming week than is realistic but can’t figure out how to drop things. 

I know this is more internal than external, but do you have any suggestions to make it more attractive? 

Hi Dodge. Thank you for the question

What you describe in your question is something I know a lot of people worry about. It’s horrible to go into your task manager at the end of the week and see just how much you have not done, that a week ago you decided must be done. It didn’t get done and you feel guilty. 

Now, with this, you need to give yourself a mindset shift. Nobody is going to consistently get everything done they planned to each week because there are far too many unknowns that will come your way once the week gets underway. 

Planning the week is in many ways a guessing game. You have to try and guess what emergencies will happen and how long they will take to sort out. Even the most experienced practitioner is going to find that almost impossible to accomplish. 

Instead, we want to be looking at the weekly planning session as a learning process. Each week we will identify a number of tasks that at the time of the planning session we feel must be done next week. So we give them a date and hope we will have the time to complete them. 

At the end of the week, we find a quarter to half of those tasks we thought had to be done have not been done and we feel guilty and it can erode our confidence in the system.

When this happens, it does not mean you have failed. It means you have likely been a little over-ambitious (and there’s nothing wrong with that) The key thing is you learn and become a little more strict about what goes into your this week folder. 

Going a little deeper with this, I would suggest you give yourself a few minutes to look at the tasks you didn’t do and ask yourself why. What was it about these tasks that caused you not to do them? After all, a week ago you felt these were tasks that must be done. They did not get done, so they clearly weren’t must-do tasks. What made you think they were? What changed in the week that relegated these tasks to “should-dos? 

You’ll find these questions uncomfortable at first, but be patient. Over time you will learn the patterns and once you know the patterns of what causes your must-do tasks to turn into should-dos, you’ll be able to approach things differently. It’ll also teach you what you may think is a must-do task, is not. 

The most common reason for this is something changed in the project that demoted the task. Or something else came up that was more important. In that analysis, there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s life happening and is, in many ways a good thing. 

However, there is another reason tasks don’t get done. That’s because you erroneously thought it was an important task and it was not. That’s a sign you haven’t got your prioritisation up to scratch. Now the thing about prioritisation is this is a learned skill - it is an art. There’s no science here. If you are new to having a time management system, you are not going to be great at prioritisation. That’s a given. Learning to prioritise is a skill that needs to be learned and more importantly, you need to have identified what your core work and areas of focus are. 

I often find people struggling with prioritisation, skipped the section in the TIme Sector Course on identifying your core work. If you are not absolutely clear what your core work is, then everything thrown at you, while at work, will become a priority. You’ll be doing tasks to impress your boss that has no relation to your core work. You’ll be focusing on the wrong things—a salesperson who focuses on having perfect admin will never be a good salesperson. 

If you have not identified your areas of focus, you are going to find prioritisation difficult because your areas of focus and your core work are where your priorities come from. If you do not know what these are, then everything in your task manager could potentially be a priority. 

So, what do you do if you have a lot of uncompleted tasks at the end of the week? Well, first don’t beat yourself up. These things will happen and clearly not doing them the world hasn’t ended. All you need do is renegotiate with yourself when you will do them. 

I find looking at my overdue and uncompleted tasks as an opportunity to assess whether I really want to do them. Some of those tasks will need doing—project work for your boss or client for example, but often you’ll look at a task and realise you don’t really need to do it, or you could delegate it to someone else or modify the task. 

Once you’ve done that, rescheduled the tasks that need to be done you can look at what else needs doing. Here you want to be realistic. There’s an expression “biting off more than you can chew” and we are all guilty of this from time to time. 

If you are consistently not completing your tasks it means you need to reduce the number of tasks you are trying to accomplish each week. Now, you may say; ‘I can’t I have to do these tasks’, but the thing is you’re not doing them. Either you are going to continue to delude yourself or you are going to get realistic. My advice is get realistic. You’ll feel a lot better if you do. 

Your weekly planning session needs to be something you look forward to. Now one of the problems I used to have with the Getting Things Done weekly review was firstly how long it took. To review everything Getting Things Done advises you to review took me between 1 and a half and two hours. I dreaded sitting down doing that each weekend and often skipped it altogether. 

The next problem I had with the GTD weekly Review was I was reviewing what I had done instead of planning ahead. Sure, there was some planning, but it always felt more retrospective rather than forward looking. 

When I changed my approach and focused on what I wanted to accomplish, the weekly review became a lot less negative—being reminded of how little I had accomplished. This also changed my mindset about the weekly planning session. I now looked forward to it. It’s almost become a little competition with myself. If I exercised five time this week, I will challenge myself to exercise six times next week and make that an objective. If I wrote 5,000 words of my book this week, I’ll challenge myself to go for 6,000 next week. 

But the biggest change, for me, was instead of losing around two hours on a Sunday afternoon, I now spend thirty minutes on a Saturday morning planning out the week ahead. Once completed, I start the week with anticipation and excitement to accomplish the things I have set myself. I often don’t accomplish those, but that just gives me more motivation to have another go. 

The best thing about not accomplishing what I set is I get a lot of information about myself, how I manage my time, and I can use that information to change my approach and do a better job next week. 

And that means, I am in a state of constant and never ending improvement. And I can assure you feel you are improving, it energises you. It pushes you to do it better next time. 

Now one more thing about planning sessions. Make sure you are doing a daily planning session too. This is important because with the Time Sector System it is not necessarily about doing your tasks on the exact day you assigned them. You will often find, because of events outside of your control, you will have tasks you were unable to complete on a specific day. The daily planning session gives you a chance to reschedule those tasks to later in the week, or, if they have changed priority, to push them off to next week and beyond. Never be afraid to do that. If a task’s priority changes, then push it off to a time in the future. 

What this does is it takes care of a lot of tasks you thought had to be done this week, but now no longer do before you get to the weekly planning session. 

The weekly planning session should never be about beating yourself up. It’s a chance to reset the week, to plan out what you want to accomplish next week. Know what needs to be done and, more importantly, what does not need to be done next week. 

It should energise and educate you. When you see it as a learning experience, you are going to continuously improve your prioritisation skills, you learn what is genuinely important, and what is not. And it refocuses you on what is important to you. 

I hope that has helped, Dodge. Thank you for the question and thank you to you for listening.

It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.