#177: Prioritizing To Do Less, Achieve More (Rewind Episode)

[00:01:18] Well, hey there, it’s Heather Moulder with the Life & Law Podcast. Welcome to episode ten, where we are getting into part two of how to be more productive and do less while achieving more. Now, last week we started with really the basics. The number one thing you need to do if you want to be more productive is to prioritize properly. If you’re not prioritizing properly, then you’re not going to be very productive. I guess you could technically be productive at whatever it is you’re doing, but what’s the point if you’re not being reproductive in respect of what your true priorities are?

[00:01:58] And I think that this is something a lot of us lose sight of. So that’s why I think this is so important.

[00:02:05] Last week we started with what it means to prioritize, and we really talked about choosing that. It’s about making hard choices and the mindset that you need to have, that you need to cultivate in order to make those choices.

So we’re not going to get back into all of that today. If you missed last week’s episode, I highly recommend that you go back and listen to it and then come back here and rejoin me. I will have a link to episode number nine, which is part one of this whole conversation in the show notes.

Your Step-By-Step On How To Prioritize

Let’s just dive right into how to prioritize, because that is really what we’re getting into today. There is more than one way to determine your priorities, but I really like to use two main principles.

First Up: Know Your Values

I like to keep things pretty simple, so I recommend that you start with your values.

I’ve talked about your values before, at least a little bit, and I’m definitely going to be talking about them again. I think that following your values is incredibly important to living a more fulfilled life. But there’s more to it than that.

If you don’t know what your personal values are, you’re not quite sure what I’m talking about, you may want to go back and listen to episode number six. I first started talking about them there. That was the episode about how to get unstuck in your career.

But just a quick, brief review. Your values are kind of the filter through which everything goes. The way you see yourself, the way you see other people, the way you see the world around you, all of those are affected by your values. They’re just kind of overarching principles that are incredibly important to you and that you may not even realize you’re doing this, but you are making decisions every single day that are based upon them.

Now, it’s incredibly important to really understand what they are. So if you’ve never gone through any type of a values exercise, you may want to try to do that. Just sit down and start thinking about what are my values? What’s truly important to me? Who do I want to be known as in this world, both as a lawyer and as a person in general? What are my guiding principles? What are truly important guiding principles to me within my life?

Those are values. And they’re important because when you know your values and you’re incredibly clear on them, they give you more clarity around what your priorities are. They can help you create your bigger picture vision for what you want out of your career, what you want out of your practice, what you want out of your life.

When you have a values based vision, they give more clarity around what you want your goals to be. So I’m a huge proponent in values based goals. The reason why I like values based goals is because they help you feel more fulfilled in the work you’re doing, but they also help to motivate you and keep you focused.

We all know that achieving goals is hard work. It’s not always easy, even when we’re doing things we want to be doing or trying to achieve something we really want. So you want to help yourself be motivated and stay focused. Really connecting those goals to your values helps you to do that.

[00:05:18] It’s ultimately what helps you create the vision you really want. If you just create goals that are based on basic achievements that you’re expected to achieve, that’s not only not that motivating, but it’s not going to lead to real happiness or fulfillment. It’s probably not going to lead you into a direction that you really want to be.

So I like to get really clear around my values, and I help my clients get very clear around their values because they are an important guide for what your true priorities really are. Run your options through those values and relate them to your goals so that you can become more clear around what is and is not a priority.

[00:06:02] Okay, so that’s number one. Values are supremely important in trying to determine your priorities.

[00:06:09] And I talk about this a little bit and how to determine your values and how to utilize them to align your goals and create your vision that is values based. I talk about that within the life and law roadmap. So do be sure to download that if you have not already. I will have a link to that in the show notes.

Second, Utilize The Eisenhower Matrix

So, unfortunately, utilizing your values in this way is incredibly helpful, but it’s not really enough, especially given what you do for a living. As a lawyer, you are pulled in a million different directions. There are a lot of people trying to get your time and energy, and sometimes it gets really difficult to figure out what’s a true priority and what’s not. Everything feels and seems like a priority, but you know you can’t be doing everything. You’re one person, there’s only so much time in the day.

So you also need a good system and need a good practical way for determining what your actual priorities are. That is where the Eisenhower matrix comes into play.

If you have not heard of the Eisenhower matrix before, I want you to listen up. I want to make sure you know how to utilize it to the best of its ability. It is an incredibly useful way to determine your priorities and really figure out what feels urgent but isn’t a priority because there is a difference.

The Pareto Principle

[00:07:32] So first, I want to talk about a couple of things. Let me point out the Pareto principle. It’s also known as the 80/20 rule. The concept behind the Pareto principle is that 20% of your efforts results in 80% of your results. You could turn that around – 80% of your results is coming from only 20% of your efforts.

[00:07:52] If you focus more on that 20%, you’re gonna be more productive and going to be better off. It’s not that you’re still gonna have that other 80%. It’s that we’re spending a lot of time on things that really aren’t that important.

This whole concept of doing less to achieve more is about simplifying so that you can truly focus in on that 20% and increase it to maybe 50% or more. So that you’re focusing in on what’s important. You’re cutting out a lot of the other clutter and junk, and you’re not having to do as much yet you are much more productive.

This is another reason why prioritization is such an important principle when it comes to being productive. So the question becomes, well, how many things should you prioritize at any given time?

Now, there is, of course, a limited amount of time in the day, and you are only one person. Of course, you can only truly do one thing at a time. I’m not a multitasker. I’m not into multitasking. When it comes to difficult, complex tasks, it’s not really possible to multitask – you’re really task switching.

Stick To The Rule of 3

But sometimes you have more than one priority, and that’s okay. I like to follow the rule of three. The rule of three is basically that you would never have more than three priorities at any given time. This goes when it comes to goals, and it goes to when you set priorities for the week or for the day.

If you have more than three, it is almost always guaranteed that there will not be enough time in that day or week or even month or year if you’re looking at bigger picture goals to get it all done. So you want to only have three goals or less. You want to only have three priorities or less at any given time.

Now, understand a couple of things here. You don’t have to have three. You can have less. You can have one main priority. You can have two. That’s totally okay, but you don’t want to have more than three.

Don’t Multitask

The other thing that I want to make clear here is you only work on one thing at a time. So even if you have three main priorities that you want to get done in a day, you still have to choose what you start with, and that becomes your number one priority. After you finish that, then you move on to the next and then the next. So never, ever, ever multitask your priorities.

[00:11:12] And what we do when we focus constantly on the urgent is we don’t address things that are true priorities. Priorities around our bigger picture goals, our bigger picture vision. I got into this in the last episode – this is when people end up with big regrets, when they are jumping from one urgent thing to another.

They’re never focusing in on the things that are truly important, and they’re never doing that big, deeper work that they want to be doing. It’s a big problem, because that’s how you end up looking back on your life going, “Well, what did I do with it?” You know, I was really busy throughout my life, but did I do anything important enough? Did I do anything really big?

So it’s really important to differentiate between these two things, because urgency does not always equal importance. What’s interesting about Eisenhower is he was a five star general during World War Two. He was the 34th president of the United States, and he was a very productive guy. He accomplished a lot in his life because he understood the difference between what’s urgent versus what’s important.

[00:12:22] Okay, so how did the Eisenhower matrix come to be? Well, he didn’t actually put the Eisenhower matrix together. Stephen Covey repackaged it into his best selling book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and gave it the name the Eisenhower matrix.

The 4 Elements of the Eisenhower Matrix

[00:12:41] So here’s something. If you have the ability to take out a piece of paper and write this down, I’d love for you to do it or maybe you come back and do this later. We’re going to go through kind of the matrix and what it looks like and what each piece really is.
Think of it as a big square box. Draw a large square box and draw lines vertically and horizontally down the middle. You should have four cubes, equal cubes inside each box.

[00:13:06] So the top row is what’s important, the bottom row is what’s not important. Then you’re going to have columns. The left column is what’s urgent and the right column is what’s not urgent.

[00:13:24] So in these four cubes, the top left cube is urgent and important. The top right cube is not urgent and important. The bottom left cube is urgent and unimportant. And the bottom right cube is not urgent and not important.
Every single thing that you spend your time doing falls into one of these four categories. You probably know this, but here’s the catch – most of us don’t classify these properly. We think things are important that aren’t.

Let’s go over what they really mean.

Urgent and Unimportant

[00:14:04] Urgent and not important – those are things that need to get done but don’t necessarily need to be done by you. They could be done by you, but it’s not necessary. Scheduling certain things, responding to certain types of requests, a lot of emails fall into this category, items that could be delegated to other people. All of these things go into the urgent and not important category.

[00:14:30] Unfortunately, a lot of us, especially us lawyers, spend a lot of our time in this box. It’s a lot of what makes us so overwhelmed and feel as if we’re never going to get enough done. We work on things that are urgent but not that important.

I want you to differentiate between what’s important to you versus what’s important to someone else. Someone may come to you with a request, a colleague, for example, or maybe you are on the management committee. I have a client like this who is on the management committee and there’s all kinds of requests of your time.

These things are important to other people, but they’re not really important to you. They can be delegated or they can be set aside for another time that you have scheduled specifically for these types of things.

[00:15:18] Just because something is important to someone else does not mean it is a priority for you. I want you to get really clear around that because this trips us up so much. Lawyers do this all the time. We get dragged into things because this is your expertise or you’re better at it. No, do not do it if it’s not a priority for you, or at least don’t do it as often.

Urgent and Important

Let’s look at urgent and important. That’s something that has a clear, immediate or near immediate deadline that has consequences for you or one of your clients if the work isn’t done. When I say consequences for you, it could be because it’s clearly within your role at your firm or company, and it is something that is totally on your plate that you need to do. That is what people go to you for.

Or it could also relate to something that’s goal related, something that is truly important to you because of what your goals and priorities really are.

[00:16:18] Examples of this: maybe you have a brief that’s due tomorrow. Maybe you have a closing later this week, and there’s plenty of work that still needs to get done. Maybe you have a call from your child’s school that he’s sick and you’ve got to go pick him up – that’s an emergency, that is a priority.

[00:16:34] Maybe you have a client emergency that comes up and it’s an emergency that’s got to be dealt with within the next 24 hours. And it’s not something you can delegate at all – it’s something only you can do. That would fall under here, too, although I would be careful to ensure that it’s a true emergency because oftentimes clients call us saying something’s urgent and it’s not.

It’s a false urgency. You got to learn how to manage that better so that it doesn’t force you into false sense of urgency and push aside all of your priorities to do something that could have waited a couple of days that you could schedule.

Okay, so that’s urgent and important.

Not Urgent and Important

[00:17:12] Next is not urgent, but important. This would be goal related activities and projects with longer deadlines.

[00:17:21] These are important things. Unfortunately, because they’re not urgent, they’re the easiest things to put off and to procrastinate.

[00:17:29] Oftentimes, this is the stuff that relate to your big picture goals and dreams. They kind of seem a little overwhelming. They seem too big and or the timeline is so long that it’s really easy to put off.

If we don’t schedule time to get this stuff done, it either never gets done or it eventually gets moved into the urgent column. If you often have time that you’ve set aside to try to do things that are important and you don’t do them as scheduled and they eventually become emergencies, you’re probably jumping from one emergency to another or thinking that you’re always drinking from a fire hose because you’re not getting things done in a timely manner.

Things that fall under the not urgent important category are things like client development activities, any goal related activities, strategic planning. This is what one of my clients likes to call deep work.

As an FYI, because some of this stuff is easy to procrastinate, if you have not listened to the episode around hidden procrastination triggers, I do recommend it is episode number five, and I will have a link to it in the show notes so that you can find it.

Not Urgent and Unimportant

Last category is not urgent, not important. This is stuff that distracts us and makes us less focused. So gossip, social media, television. Sometimes, although not all television, is a time waster. Sometimes you need it to just decompress.

[00:19:07] Other things that you would consider time wasters – these are the types of things you want to delete from your schedule as much as humanly possible.

Another thing to note is this can also be requests of your time from colleagues or others that relate to items that aren’t a priority. That you feel like could be a waste of time. Meetings can definitely fall into this category.

Implementing The Eisenhower Matrix

So the question becomes, what do you do once you’ve categorized all this stuff?

Number one, everything that is non urgent but important needs to get on your schedule.

You need time to get it done so that it doesn’t hit the urgent category. Or even worse, if it’s related to bigger picture goal related activities or client development activities, it doesn’t completely fall through the cracks and never get done.

So you want to make sure you have time within your calendar and your schedule regularly. That’s for this type of work – again, for business development, for goal achievement, for the deep work that my client likes to call it. I think she actually has a couple of hours every day specifically for deep work, and it changes. What’s the deep work for the day changes on a daily basis, but it allows her time to get this stuff done.

Secondly, you want to make sure you have the time every day for your urgent and important work and you actually do that work.

This is your priority of the day before you get to your non urgent important work. You’ve got to do this first because it is urgent and important, and then you move on and you do your non urgent important work.

The goal is actually to spend most of your time in category one, scheduled important non urgent activities. But to have time set aside or time within your calendar that is there for you for urgent and important work. Because FYI, stuff is going to come up, right. That is truly important that you aren’t expecting and that is urgent. And so you want to make sure in your calendar you have that time for it. But that shouldn’t be most of what you’re doing.

The goal is to eventually to get the system down so that most of your work is in the non urgent important category.

Number three, any and all urgent but not important work needs to be delegated and or pushed off.

And when I say pushed off, I mean maybe there’s nobody to delegate it to and you already said yes to it. So you do have to get it done, but you need to push it off and schedule it so that you can get it done in your time frame. And that would be a sure sign that you need to say no more often. It’s giving you a clue as to what and where to say no.

And then finally, you want to get rid of, let go of all the non urgent, not important stuff.

Those are the time wasters you want to let go of completely.

Prioritization Traps To Avoid

So let’s go through a couple of prioritization traps that are really common for people that I don’t want you to get caught up in while you’re going through this process.

Treating Urgent As Automatically Important

Number one, we’ve already talked about it, but because it’s so important, it bears talking about. Again, thinking urgent is important. You need to remind yourself consistently, just because something feels urgent does not make it important. Okay? Make sure that whatever it is that you are thinking is important is truly important to you. The role you play within your company or firm, you know, your goals, your client work, all of that. It is not enough for it just to be urgent. If it’s not important, it’s not a priority.

Number two, this one’s a big one, doing what’s easy and simple first.

[00:22:46] So we often tend to look at, you know, our, our schedule of the day and all the things that need to get done, and we like to pick out the simple and easy things. But here’s the problem. Those things add up.

If you continually do that over and over again, you’re not going to get the more important, deeper work done. And that’s where you get your most productive work out of. So you want to make sure that you’re not wasting your time by tackling easy and simple all the time.

I actually had a recent coaching session with a client who realized that’s what they were doing and it was one of the biggest reasons why they were so overwhelmed.

It was really helpful for her to identify that because she was able to quickly change how her day went, when she let go of that and what she did do, and what you might try doing was calendaring in, like, an hour, twice a week to get those types of things done where she could kind of aggregate them and get that kind of work done. It still got done, but it wasn’t taking up so much of her time.

The other thing is getting pulled into thinking something’s a priority just because you’d be good at it.

Other people have a wonderful way of making us believe something’s a priority when it’s really nothing, because they want our help. And although it’s wonderful to help people, and I’m not saying you never should, you’ve got to be really careful about how often you allow that to happen. Because it can really take over your day.

Just because something is a priority to somebody else and they want you to help because you’d be so good at it, doesn’t mean it’s something that you need to be saying yes to right now. Because you don’t always have the time for it.

The next thing to be careful for is not delegating every single thing that can be delegated.

We often like to tell ourselves, and this is really a lie, that we love to convince ourselves that we have to be the one. We have to be the one, because nobody else is going to do it. As well as us understand that other people are never going to get good enough if they’re never given the chance. And so that’s part of the training process, number one. But number two, sometimes it really just doesn’t matter. Is it good enough? Can they do it good enough, or can they do it good enough for you, then to pick it back up and spend much less time on it to make it what you want it. Right?

Don’t be afraid to delegate just because it’s not going to be the same as you or quite as good as you. It may very well be good enough.

Final Tips For Proper Prioritization

[00:25:13] Okay, so a few final words on how to stay on track.

Number one, capture everything on a master list (but NOT a to-do list).

[00:25:25] So we often tend to treat our to do lists as these huge lists of things that need to get done, and they’re really overwhelming and incredibly unhelpful. Your to do list really should be short. It should have your up to three priorities that need to get done in that day. Okay. Or for that week.

[00:25:45] Everything else needs to be on a not now later list, I like to call it, that allows you to then maybe once a week or every couple of days, look back at it, see what’s there, and determine what your actual priorities are from that day, what you can cross off that list and get done that day. But they’re not your priorities list, and they’re not what you should be looking at every single day.

[00:26:06] It’s kind of a waystation for things so that you don’t forget it, so that you feel like you’re on top of things, but you don’t have to check them constantly and they’re nothing. It’s not your to do list. All right? So recommend capturing everything on a master list and not now later list. And then that means keeping your to do list short so that you can truly focus on those things and have that there as a reminder of, this is what I need to get done today.

[00:26:33] So this is how I like to do it. And this is how I counsel my clients to do this.

Balancing Goals vs. Current Needs

[00:26:38] When I have goals, I like to have annual goals, but then I break them down into 90 day goals. We’re just going to say this from the goal kind of perspective. And so I have like a 90 day goal, right, that I’m trying to meet.

[00:26:50] Well, every week I look at, well, how can I move that goal forward?

And the same thing goes for my priorities, right. I look at my calendar, I look at what’s on board with my clients, I work at my obligations. I look at the time I’ve got, I look at, okay, what can I move forward this week? And I set my three main priorities for the week. You could do this, too, right?

I did this when I was practicing law. You know, what closings do I have coming up? What, you know, what’s on the horizon and what needs to get done this week.

I would set three main priorities, and then I’d look, and every week I’d look back at it in the morning and say, okay, what do I need to get done today? I had up to three things. Sometimes it would be one big thing, sometimes it would be three smaller things. And those are what go on your to do list, okay. And that’s what you focus on, not all the other stuff. That’s what you focus on to make sure you get it done that day.

Eat The Frog

Next is, you’ve probably heard this, eat the frog, right? So instead of focusing on the easy, quick and simple stuff, start with something big and get it done. Set aside time every single morning to get something big done. Again, as my client says, the deep work and do not move on to anything else until that one thing is done.

[00:28:05] So this is really about time blocking as well.

[00:28:10] Time blocking is when you have specific time, like 90 minutes to 2 hours set aside to get something deep and big done. And if you finish it before that, great. You can start utilizing your time for other things, but it allows you the space you need to get that deeper, bigger, harder work done.

I promise if you start there, the rest of your day is going to go by a lot quicker. You’re going to feel more productive, you are going to be more productive. When we start with all those super simple, quick, easy little things, they add up and it makes it really hard for us to get that work done.

The other thing is, is as the day goes on, you know, we get more emails, we get more interruptions. When you get more calls, we get little emergencies that do come up that are priorities. This allows you some time at the front of the day to get something big done and at least get one of your big priorities done no matter what happens later in the day.

Use Your Calendar & People

Do not be afraid to have time blocked off every week at certain time intervals for that deeper, bigger work that you just do not give in on. So when you’re time blocking, you’ve got to use your calendar, otherwise you’re not going to utilize your time properly for yourself.

[00:29:24] Also, use your assistants and others to help you. If you’ve got an assistant, you know, make sure they understand that there are certain times of the day or certain days of the week where you’re doing this deeper work where it’s set aside and you’re forwarding your phone and you’re not allowing people to come in for interruptions unless they’re true emergencies.

[00:29:46] And then also be flexible. So sometimes you might realize as you get started on something that what you started isn’t as relevant, important or urgent as you thought. Do allow yourself to be flexible. Do allow yourself to rethink these things and reschedule it or do it later if you figure out something else is more important.

[00:30:09] Okay, so I hope that today has really helped you. Last week we got into the mindset and what it means to choose and how important, yet difficult it is to choose your priorities. Today we got into the more practical side of how to actually prioritize.

Note that they do go hand in hand and it’s not always easy to do. So do get help if you need it. There are plenty of wonderful coaches. Doesn’t have to be me that can help you with this.