We’re all becoming busier. Do you find that:

• You’re always pressed for time?
• There never seem to be enough hours in the day?
• You wake up in the morning feeling a great load on you of all the things you have to do that day?
• You are stressed in work because of overload?
• You think you’ve never done enough?

Imagine waking up in the morning and instead of feeling a great weight on you, asking yourself: what things do I need to put into this empty day?

Rather than stressing about how much you need to pack into the day ahead, imagine asking what actually needs to be done and why? Why do you think a certain thing is so important? If you can’t come up with a good enough answer, are you going to do it anyway? And if so, why? Why would you do that?

There’s an exercise I do on my training courses where I get people to figure out how much work they have to do and how much time they have available to do it. Ten or fifteen years ago it would have been really unusual to find somebody who was 100% overloaded. (Pause and think about this for a moment – 100% overloaded means doing the work of two people.) These days, the same exercise yields about half the people on the course being 100% or more overloaded. And this situation is not getting better.

Faced with workloads like this, how can people be productive? It seems to me that people adopt two strategies to deal with this situation. Let’s look at them in turn.

Time management

The first thing people say is, ‘Ah ha, it’s a time management problem’. So they go on a course or buy a book – and then more often than not, fall back into their old ways.

If you go on a time management course or read a time management book and do what it says and, then sure, you will get more done. But you won’t have solved the problem of having too much to do and not enough time to do it. That is not the problem that time management courses and books solve. So when people say, ‘I fell back into my old ways’, that’s not what happened. It was just that the problem of too much to do and not enough time to do it hadn’t gone away.

So when time management doesn’t work, the next thing people try is to work crazy hours.

Working crazy hours

Now I can only assume that if somebody works crazy hours, they believe – though they may not have actually rationalized it like this – that if they work long enough hours, they will get everything done.

And I can only say that if you believe that, then you’re nuts. You could work all the hours you were given and not get everything done. You could be granted several lifetimes and not get everything done.

It’s also worth saying that working long hours for sustained periods of time is completely unproductive as the following table shows.

But there is a solution to being more productive. And – bizarrely – that solution is instead of trying to do more, we should be trying to do less.

Now in some ways, this is a very radical idea. But in other ways it’s not radical at all. Since – clearly – some things will never be done, it’s just a question of who decides. You can let Fate decide – by which I mean a combination of the culture of the organization in which you work, your own culture, your boss’s personality, the guilt you feel when leaving on time, random things that happen during the day and a whole bunch of others factors – or you can decide. All I’m proposing here is that you decide.

Do less

Here’s how to do it. (I know there are issues here about who can make these decisions but for the moment, you make them. You decide. Then, we’ll talk about who else has to get involved.)

1. Make a list of everything you have to do in work.
2. Now divide the list into the things that are wildly important and the things that aren’t. And no, not everything is ‘wildly’ important:
   1. First, you decide – as though the decision rested completely with you.
   2. It doesn’t, of course – so now check it with whoever you have to check it with – most likely your boss.
   3. Finally, if there are things on your list that your boss thinks are important but you’re not convinced, then test your theory. Don’t do them and see what happens. (I’m quite serious about this.) You’ll soon find out! There’s some more detail on each of these below.
3. For the things that are wildly important, prioritize them. Do this by taking the list and asking, ‘If I could only do one thing, what would it be?’ This becomes your #1 priority. Now take the remaining list and ask the question again – ‘If I could only do one thing, what would it be?’ This is your #2 priority. Keep doing this until the list is prioritized.
4. For the things that are not wildly important, ignore them. Don’t do them. Ever.

Keep it going

If you like the sound of this idea, then you could start tomorrow – behaving as though this were true. But here’s how to keep it going long-term and make it part of the way you work. There are five things you can do.