Celebrate the Pruning Process
The whole point of this chapter has been to get you comfortable cutting as many things as possible from your calendar. Like a good gardener, it’s time to prune your calendar of as many things outside your Desire Zone as possible. When you look at your schedule and to-do list, you want to see only the right things. Eliminating means cutting away all the wrong things—even if that’s 80 percent of your list. Of course, the process of elimination may leave you in an unexpected predicament: you might end up feeling guilty about the time you’re freeing up. You may feel like you’re letting other people down by saying no when you have time to help them. This is a trap. If cutting out unnecessary or undesirable tasks leaves you with free time or margin, that is something to celebrate! It is certainly nothing to feel bad about.
As Steve Jobs said, “Innovation means saying no to a thousand things.” Don’t give in to the pressure of finding a thousand other things to replace the ones you said no to. You aren’t making a one-to-one swap as you strike things off your list. As we’ve said many times, the goal of productivity should be achieving more by doing less. You won’t get there if you can’t get comfortable doing less. Your best actions and best thinking come when you’re well rested and you’ve given yourself the benefit of free time. It inspires creativity and problem-solving like nothing else. So please, make a commitment to free time and don’t feel a single ounce of guilt or shame about saying no to activities that are outside your Desire Zone in order to say yes to free time. You’ll be so glad you did—and so will the people you love the most.
Take a breath. In the next chapter you’ll learn how to automate some of the pesky tasks that are still taking up space on your list.
BUILD YOUR OWN NOT-TO-DO LIST
Time to start eliminating the nonessentials in your life! This is where you start to see your vision of freedom come into focus. Start with your Task Filter worksheet and mark obvious candidates for elimination. Next, download a Not-to-Do List at FreeToFocus.com/tools. Use this worksheet to record the tasks you should do.
Your Task Filter gave you a head start, but don’t stop there. Can you think of any others? List the meetings, relationships, and opportunities you should never pursue. Maybe it’s a board you need to quit or a report that’s outlived its usefulness. When you complete your Not-to-Do List, you should be able to look back at it and recognize each of the items listed as being too low-leverage, unimportant, or irrelevant to occupy your attentions at all.
5
Automate
Subtract Yourself from the Equation
Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.
ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD
If you’re like most professionals in the modern world, your days are filled with questions, demands, requests, pop-in visits, emails, phone calls, texts, Slack messages, and a million other distractions from people who want your full attention. As we’ve already learned, however, our attention is both finite and valuable. We can never give everyone our full attention, and sometimes we can’t give them any. If you want to maximize your productivity, you must identify exactly what does and does not require your attention and, if something does deserve it, you must figure out how much of your attention it deserves. Here’s a hint: if it’s something that is not in your Desire Zone or one of your high-priority tasks, it doesn’t deserve much of your brain power.
One method of taking care of critical tasks with little investment of attention is automation. Normally, when I say automation, people assume I mean robots, apps, and macros. But it doesn’t take an engineer or a geek to benefit from automation. Every day jobs come up that we don’t have time to think about, yet they still need to get done. But who says you have to give the job your full attention? What if you could subtract yourself from the equation and still get the job done? That’s where automation comes in, and I like to think of the topic under four main headers:
self-automation
template automation
process automation
tech automation
In this chapter we’ll look at all four and explore several key automation strategies that will enable you to put many of your Drudgery and Disinterest Zone tasks on autopilot.
Self-Automation
Your first step is automating yourself through a process of self-automation. This involves implementing routines, rituals, and habits to make it easier and more efficient for you to follow through on your highest priorities. Again, the focus here is to put as many things in your life on autopilot as possible so you don’t have to stop and think about them every time they come up. You want to build rituals and routines so your body knows what to do even if you aren’t consciously thinking about it. For example, most people don’t have to concentrate on the specific steps involved in taking a shower; they simply know what to do after they turn the water on. Their bodies take over, freeing their minds up to think about other things. That’s one reason why we often have such great ideas in the shower. Applying this simple approach to different swaths of your life can be a game changer.
Understanding Rituals. A ritual is “any practice or pattern of behavior regularly performed in a set manner.”1 For example, most professional athletes have a pregame ritual, a series of actions that set them up mentally and physically to perform at their best. This is true of high-achievers across all professions. Mason Currey’s book Daily Rituals: How Artists Work explores the daily rituals of more than one hundred fifty novelists, poets, playwrights, painters, philosophers, scientists, mathematicians, and others. Rituals help these diverse professionals accomplish the same goal we’re striving for here: achieve more by doing less. Your daily rituals, says Currey, “can be a finely calibrated mechanism for taking advantage of a range of limited resources: time (the most limited resource of all) as well as willpower, self-discipline, optimism.”2
Rituals offer three key benefits that set you up to win. First, while many believe rituals squash creativity, the truth is that rituals liberate creativity. Properly formulating rituals requires a tremendous amount of creativity and thought. However, a ritual requires that effort only one time per task. The goal is to avoid reinventing the wheel every time the same issue comes up. Instead, you focus your creative energy on something once, put a system in place to apply that solution every time, and then you are free to focus your creativity on other things. Consider your daily drive to work. There, you don’t have to think about the motions you’re going through. Sure, in the first week or two, you had to put a lot of energy into figuring out the best way to the office, how to avoid traffic, and what time you needed to leave. After that initial burst of effort and mental energy, though, the ritual takes over. From then on, your creative juices are free to focus on other things during your drive.
Second, rituals speed up your work. Once you define a ritual, you know exactly what comes next at every step. It’s automatic; you simply don’t have to think about it, which naturally makes you much more efficient at that task.
Third, rituals correct your mistakes. It might be more accurate to say they prevent mistakes, because designing rituals allows you to anticipate different points of possible failure and build in safety nets for each step in the process. Even if you hit a snag early on, you can simply build the solution into your ritual, making the rituals self-correcting over time. Surgeon and medical writer Atul Gawande has highlighted the power of rituals codified in checklists to eliminate error across several industries. He extols the “virtues of regimentation.”3 In his own field, medicine, checklists save thousands of lives and hundreds of millions of dollars every year.
Four Foundational Rituals. You can build a ritual around any repetitive task in your life. In fact, you can create rituals for how, when, and in what order to accomplish a number of different tasks. I utilize and recommend four foundational rituals: morning, evening, workday startup, and workday shutdown. I schedule time for these on my I
deal Week, which I’ll cover in chapter 7. By keeping the system running as intended, I’m able to move predictably and efficiently through several necessary actions each day, which keeps my mind free for more hours each day than if I were trying to remember these actions on the fly each and every time I did them.
My morning ritual starts the moment I wake up and carries me all the way into the office each morning. This ritual has nine points, such as “Make a cup of coffee,” “Read the Bible,” “Journal,” and “Review my goals.” Together, these nine actions become a routine. I do them the same way, in the same order, every day, which helps me perform them at my best and sets me up for the rest of the day. My evening ritual works much the same way, except it helps me wind down and get ready for sleep. (And here’s a pro tip: set an alarm to ensure you go to bed on time.) Everyone’s morning and evening rituals will be different, depending on personality, interests, stage of life, and other qualifiers.
What about workday startup and shutdown? These two rituals are clearly marked on my calendar every weekday. My workday startup ritual starts at 9:00 a.m., shutdown at 5:00 p.m. At those two times every day, my brain goes through the motions needed to start or end the workday. I’ve thought through exactly what needs to happen to get each workday off to a good start and how to end it well, and I put those tasks into a ritual.
As soon as I step into the office, I begin my workday startup ritual. By repeating the same actions in the same order every day, my muscle memory takes over and I can efficiently move through the small set of tasks I need to perform at the start of each day. Again, the list and order of elements will vary by person, but here are the five tasks I need to do to get my workday off to a great start every day:
Empty my email inbox
Catch up on Slack
Check social media
Review Big 3 (which we’ll discuss in chapter 8)
Review my schedule
This ritual usually takes about thirty minutes, so the first half hour of my workday, every day, is dedicated to it. This keeps me from dragging this set of tasks out over the entire morning while I’m trying to focus on other things. It also prevents me from getting derailed by someone else’s agenda.
At 5:00 p.m. each evening I begin my workday shutdown ritual. Unsurprisingly, this batch of actions is almost exactly like my startup ritual: email, Slack, and so on. That’s because, at this point, I haven’t checked email or other messages for about eight hours, and I know I’ll need to respond to queries or issues that popped up throughout the day. Since I know I’ll be responding more in the evening than I do in the morning, I block off about an hour for the shutdown ritual. If I finish the ritual earlier, I’ll go home early. My shutdown ritual includes the same five things as the startup ritual, but I add two more things. First, I review my key weekly tasks and my key daily tasks. Second, I set my next day’s key tasks. More on that, by the way, in chapter 8.
Hopefully you are already starting to identify some opportunities for self-automation in your life. It could be a morning, startup, or shutdown ritual like mine, or it could be something altogether different. Perhaps you have a particular way you prepare presentations at work that would be a perfect candidate for automation through a ritual. Once you start looking for opportunities, you will see them everywhere. At the end of this chapter, you’ll get started with an activity designed to get your own morning and evening rituals up and running in no time.
Template Automation
In the previous chapter I shared a template I use when budding authors ask me to review their book proposals. That was an example of template automation, and it has been one of my favorite forms of automation for more than three decades. I get requests like this practically every day, and if I had to stop to write a personal, unique email response for every one, I would have no time left to do anything else. Of course, I could hire an assistant just to handle all those incoming requests, but why? Instead, for each one of these things, I spend a little time crafting the perfect response, and then I use that response over and over again. Like we’ve said before, automation means solving a problem once, then putting the solution on autopilot. Templates let you do this with just a few clicks.
To make templates work, you need to develop a template mindset. Every time you work on a project, ask yourself, What components of this project will I use again? If it’s something you expect to do more than once or twice, consider creating a template. Even though it takes a little extra effort on the front end, it will save you an enormous amount of time overall.
The most common type of template I use in my everyday work is email templates. You’ve seen one of these, but trust me, there are more. In fact, I personally have thirty-nine different email templates set up on my computer, ready to go in an instant. My team has embraced this concept, and they have added even more templates to the pile. Collectively, we have more than a hundred email templates we use on a regular basis. If you were to email me or one of my team members right now, there’s a good chance you’d get a template-based response. Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s cold and impersonal. I wouldn’t even call it a form letter. Instead, each email template is a thoughtful, personal response to the questions and requests my team is most likely to receive on any given day. It’s thoughtful, because we’ve spent a good bit of time on the front end thinking through our responses. And it’s personal, because we build in ways to personalize it to each recipient to make it feel as though it was written just for them.
Now that you know what an email template is, let’s explore how I use them. The first step, obviously, is to write a draft of the email. If it’s a common email, you probably already have a few different versions of the message saved in your email client’s Sent folder. Go back through your old emails and find one that could be crafted into a template. Then write out a new version of the email as though you were responding to a specific individual. Think through all the different ways you could respond and serve the person. In the email I send to authors asking for my help, I was sure to include a link to a relevant blog post I had written and a link to an online training I offer on the subject. I covered all the bases in that draft. That doesn’t mean you won’t tweak or improve your template over time, but the goal is never having to repeat your high-level thinking.
You might be thinking that the next step is to save the email draft as a document in a folder and copy and paste it into a new email every time you need it. You could do that, but there is a much faster and easier way, and practically any email client will do it. The secret sauce is your computer’s email signature feature. I personally use a Mac computer and the basic Apple Mail email client for my email. Like most email apps, Apple Mail lets you save a number of different email signatures. Normally, you’d just use these to automatically insert your name and perhaps your business contact information, but we are going to turn this simple feature into a productivity powerhouse. Once I create a new email template, I save it in my email client as a new signature. Then, when I need it, I can put it into the body of an email in one or two clicks.
In Apple Mail and Outlook, for instance, your saved signatures appear in a drop-down list in a tool bar at the top of the message window. So, when an email request comes in, you can simply hit Reply and choose the appropriate template via email signature from the drop-down list. From there, you can (and usually should) personalize the email with the person’s name, but that’s about it. What once took ten minutes or more can be knocked out in less than a minute, sometimes in just a few seconds. This is a powerful time-saving strategy for slogging through mounds of email quickly.
Templates aren’t just for email, though. You can also create templates of hard-copy letters you send through the mail. For example, if you regularly hire people, you can create letter templates indicating that an application has been received or reviewed. You can even put your digital signature on the document, so you won’t have to sign it when you need to send one. Also, if you frequently give presentations using a Keyn
ote or PowerPoint slide deck, you could create a basic template of the slide deck that already has the layout, graphics, and title slides ready to go. However you use templates, the basic concept remains the same: don’t reinvent the wheel. Solve a problem once, write it down, and then have it ready to go with just a few clicks whenever you need it.
Process Automation
The third type of automation, process automation, simply refers to a written, easy-to-follow set of instructions for performing a job or sequence. It’s similar in some ways to a ritual, but process workflows are generally much more detailed and specific to a set of tasks. Whereas a ritual is more akin to a routine, a process workflow is more like the set of instructions you’d use to assemble a bicycle for your child or a new piece of furniture from IKEA. In those cases, each step of the process is carefully detailed and written, ensuring anyone who can follow directions can successfully accomplish the goal.
I’m sure you can already think of at least one cumbersome process that would benefit from a streamlined, documented workflow. The great news is that they’re far easier to create than you can imagine, and their usefulness can’t be overstated. Here are five steps to wrangling those annoying, common tasks into one killer process.
1. Notice. The first step in creating a workflow is to pay attention to what you’re already doing each week and identify areas where a workflow could help. What actions are key to your business? Which are repetitive by nature? What tasks do you always have to teach someone before you leave town on vacation? What questions have others called to ask you while you were out of the office? What tasks have caused projects to stall because you weren’t personally available? Notice the rhythms of your business and note obvious pain points that need documentation. Chances are, you’ve already thought of several.
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