जिंदगी में शादी के अलावा ट्रेन में RAC ही एक ऐसी स्थिति है,जिसमें दो अजनबी साथ निभाने को मजबूर होते है। - Junaid

If You Don't Prioritize Your Day, Someone Else Will

By: Greg McKeown. New York Times Bestselling Author

Fifteen years ago a friend invited me to his wedding in Denver, Colorado. At...
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the time I was a law student, but I knew I didn't want to become a lawyer. The trip to the US proved to be a godsend. Instead of checking off items from an unvanquishable to-do list, I found the space to stand back and look at my life from a distance.

Upon my return to the UK, I quit law school. My only plan was to act on a different sort of list: "What would I do if I could do anything?" Fast-forward to today: I'm now 36 and I live in Silicon Valley with my wife and four children. I teach personal and organizational leadership to companies including Apple, Google and Facebook. I write a blog for Harvard Business Review, here on LinkedIn and on my blog and between them average a million readers a month. Which is all to say, the decision has led to a higher point of contribution.

The situation for many of us is that life is fast and full of opportunity. The complication is we think we have to do everything. The implication of this is that we make only a little bit of progress in too many directions. My position is we can make a different choice. We can make hard decisions between what is good and what is essential. The benefit is we can accomplish something truly great. At times we might have to be a little bit ruthless. Most of us have forgotten that the Latin predecessor of the word decide is "to cut or to kill." As Mr Francis Chan said, "Our greatest fear should not be of failure but of succeeding at things that don't really matter."

Below are five simple ways to put an end to time-wasting and ensure you can trade-off good activities for great ones.

Start with a Power Half an Hour. In the midst of Microsoft’s most intense success, Mr Bill Gates took a week every six months to read and reflect. He called it his “think week” and he often read upwards of 100 technical articles to ensure he was thinking about the bigger picture. One way I apply this practice is to spend the first 30 minutes reading wisdom literature and writing in a journal instead of reaching for my phone to check email. The phone fills you with external noise. Reading and thinking attunes you to your internal voice.

Use a Single Item To-Do List. The history of the word “priority” came into the English language in the 1400s and was singular. It meant the very first thing. It kept that clear definition until the 1900s when we pluralized the term and started speaking of “priorities.” But, how can we really have many first things? We can apply this daily by making a list of six things we think are important for the next day and put them in priority order. Then cross off the bottom five. Take that single item and schedule the first two hours of the next day to work on it and nothing else. A star of the investment community told me this has been the most useful single practice he has ever used to focus his career. Now he advises CEOs in his portfolio companies to take up the same discipline.

Design Your Week into Daily Themes. Mr Jack Dorsey is the cofounder of Twitter and the CEO of Square, a mobile payments company based in San Francisco. On feeling the strain of trying to navigate every kind of request, every day of the week he came up with a different approach. He has selected a primary theme for each day of his week. Every Monday is for running the company (management meetings, really). Tuesday is focused on the product. Wednesday is marketing and growth. Thursday is about developers. Friday is his chance to focus on the company culture. Anyone can follow the approach if you start modestly: instead of trying to spend every minute on one theme start by using your negotiable time towards this theme. It will allow you to focus more strategically rather than simply reacting to every email.

Discover the Perks of Being More Selective. That something is good is an insufficient reason for doing it. Indeed, if we simply pursue all the good opportunities that come to us we will quickly be consumed at our current level of contribution. We risk plateauing in our progress. To break through to the next level we need to be selective. As Mr Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, puts it “Entrepreneurs succeed when they say ‘yes’ to the right project, at the right time, in the right way. To accomplish this, they have to be good at saying ‘no’ to all their other ideas.” Over breakfast recently Mr Tom Friel, the former CEO of Heidrick & Struggles, headhunters for the Fortune 500, passed along what he had learned from decades of working with some of the best and brightest: “We need to learn the slow ‘yes’ and the quick ‘no.’”

Beware the Power of Commitment Traps. Pride of ownership is a virtue but it has a downside when it leads us to overvalue something simply because we own it. The term for this is “the endowment effect” and it is what makes it hard to give away something we own. In the act of giving it away we become especially aware of our ownership and it’s often enough to make us keep it. The cure for this is to pretend you don’t own it. Ask yourself, “If I didn’t own this, how hard would I work to get it now?” The same is true for opportunities, “If this opportunity hadn’t come to me, how hard would I work to make this happen?”

Essentialism isn’t about doing more things it’s about doing more of the right things. It means it means saying no to many good things so we can say yes to a few great things. It is a disciplined pursuit of what really matters. It is hard; it is worth it.