Leadership: The Easy Stuff

It's so tempting.

Most people begin with the easy stuff when they plan their work day.

They check e-mail. They visit friends. They shuffle papers.

While some easy tasks are necessary, most of them are the wrong place to start. Instead, these tasks should be saved for low energy periods, such as just after lunch or just before closing the office.

In addition, some easy tasks are distractions that people use to avoid more important work (i.e., they invent a complex tangle of easy tasks to procrastinate).

Effective time management begins with the hard stuff.

This, you may recognize is a standard Time Management strategy: Work on important tasks before they become urgent.

Most important tasks are hard. They require thought, effort, and work.

Yet, when people neglect the hard stuff, they end up in trouble. Then they have a crisis, which requires (finally) working on the hard stuff, except now someone else is telling them what to do and how to do it.

So, here's your challenge:

1) Begin your day with the hard stuff.

2) Add at least one hard task to your schedule each day.

Eventually, two good things will happen.

1) The hard stuff will become easy.

2) You will run out of hard stuff.

And then everything becomes easy.

Key Point: The easy stuff is a distraction from the high value work that needs to be done.

Much success,

Steve Kaye

714-528-1300

PS: My Workshop on Time Management shows how to make the hard stuff easy.

Author, Speaker, IAF Certified Professional Facilitator

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