📝 Despite being an entrepreneur in full control of his schedule, Jakob Greenfeld writes that he was working “normal hours” from about 8am to 6pm each day…
It’s what everyone else does, so I just did it too.
Now I realize that this approach is far from optimal.
What was always happening is that I would work on things that didn’t really matter just to fill the time.
I rationalized this by thinking that every single little thing I can do helps.
You never know what task is the butterfly wing flap causing a hurricane.
Also tiny efforts compound, right?
🤔 But he eventually realized…
When you’re working so many hours and work on dozens of tiny tasks, you lose clarity of thought and quickly stop seeing the forest for the trees.
So you enter this spiral where you work on fewer and fewer tasks with truly big leverage.
More busywork starts to creep in.
And you start to feel like you’re not making progress.
So he switched to a new “productivity protocol”…
I keep a big Master List of tasks I could be working on.
Every morning I pick a maximum of three key tasks from the list.
When I get these tasks done I consider the day a success in terms of work. I can stop working without feeling guilty…
But here’s the key.
I’m not allowed to add any new tasks to my daily todo list during the day.
All new tasks go on the Master List first.
This stops him getting bogged down in busywork 👍
Also, to combat shiny object syndrome…
There’s always a 24 hour waiting period before I can start working on a new task.
Quite often it turns out the task no longer needs to be done or seems important/urgent enough to be worth my time.
Some nice ideas there you might want to test out for yourself.
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