Imagine for a second, you were taking a plane flight to Hawaii. You look at the ticket and it says you leave at 8am, but there is no arrival time. You ask the gate agent when your flight will land. She says “Well, the pilot is going to fly as far as he can today, you may be spending the night in California, but who knows, you might just make it today.”
Wouldn’t you feel a little uneasy about your flight? Wouldn’t it be better to know in advance where you’d be at 5pm – even if it was just California? How will you arrange for hotels and rental car if you get into California and that’s as far as the pilot can make it? It’s the same with your task list. Having too many tasks left open-ended, causes unnecessary pressure and perhaps disappointment for your clients or employer.
On the other hand, what if you could leave work every day feeling on top of the world, without a care, all of your tasks completed and an evening free to do whatever you want.
I’ll show you how to do that, but first a question. Do you ever have one of those days when you leave work feeling like for the “wheel spinning” you did all day, you got “nothing done?”
Getting farther behind is a bad feeling isn’t it? You have to get back on track the next day and work even harder to catch up. What’s worse is you can bring this unfinished business home to where it affects our family, home life and sometimes lead to insomnia.
The solution is what I call the 100% productivity solution.
Think for a moment of the joys associated with 100%. How do you feel when you do a project completely? Think for a moment about not leaving anything undone. Your projects are complete, “finito”…your boss or client could take a white glove to it and not find a spec of dust.
Imagine how you could chop out so much stress from your life if every day at 5p.m. you completed everything. Yep, at 5, instead of a bunch of unfinished loops, you’ve got three or four 100%’s under your belt. You’ve done what you needed to do…completely.
100% feels good. You can go to bed with a clean conscience that you’ve done everything you needed to do. You will also have more free and fun time because you won’t worry about tomorrow’s problems today. You have completed everything for today, so go ahead and enjoy a game with friends, go see that movie or gasp! Watch TV…
Before I get into how to set up the 100% solution in your own life, let’s first look at why you might not be doing it already. If, as I mentioned, you are overwhelmed, spinning your wheels, or feeling as if you can’t get anything done, you most likely have unrealistic targets for your day.
Unrealistic targets are tasks or objectives you have set that probably exist on your task list, but here’s the twist. Unrealistic targets cannot be completed in one day.
To give an example, in working with some of you, I’ve seen task lists with items such as “Write my first novel”, “Save up enough money for my Corvette” and “Lose 50 pounds” listed as tasks. These are not tasks people! They should never go on a task list!
Unless you have the ability to write an entire novel in 1 day, you will want to set a more “down to earth” task such as “write 3 pages” on your task list. You can write 3 pages in a day – easy. A whole novel? That’s stress-city.
Slow down and think
The first step in the 100% solution is to slow down and think. We have probably all been in a situation more than once where we had more to do than we had time available. That’s where sayings like “there isn’t enough hours in the day” come from. The reason we feel this way is we’ve committed to too much. There “isn’t enough hours” to do everything. But if we slow down and think, we can figure out what is important and deserves to be included in the tasks just for today.
Know your daily task limit
The second step is to know your task limit. In other words, how can you list your tasks in such a way that you have enough time to do them until they are 100% complete by days end?
The difference between a non addicted drinker and an alcoholic is the casual drinker knows her limit and then stops. If you are going to put the 100% solution to work for you, you need to know your limit for one day’s activities and adjust your task list accordingly. Do you really have the time today to write, edit, proof, re-edit and deliver your TPS report? Or is it more practical that today you have the time for gathering information, writing an outline and completing your first draft?
You see, if you can set reasonable expectations for yourself, you’ll still be getting stuff done, but by using the 100% solution you feel good at the end of the day instead of feeling behind. Since you are doing your tasks until they are 100% complete, your work quality goes up and you feel better about what you are doing. There’s no sense in stressing out about unfinished business, because you have done well with the objectives you had for today.
Stop when you are complete
So what do you do if it’s 5:30 in the evening, you normally work until 7, but you’ve completed all of your major objectives of the day?
Simple! What you do is stop. Go have a life.
Stopping can be tough if you are used to challenging yourself. But let’s face facts. Work is not your life. You need rest, you need fun and you need relaxation. What’s the point of going on your journey of achievement if you hate every minute of it?
Besides, what can happen if you decide, “Well, I’m done, I should stop now, but maybe if I just called Eileen about what corporate said…” The next you know, you are looped into another late night of work and stress…See? I told you to stop.
Work 100% on your new list
The key to making this method work full time is to complete each task 100% every day. You may be used to seeing a task list with 50 items on it. At times in my life, I’ve had over 100. But the 100% solution requires you pick only a handful. You will want to choose 3 of your bigger/ most important tasks a day.
Remember, these are tasks you will work on until they are 100% complete.
If your task is to write and spell-check 3 pages, you can’t say “hey I wrote 2 and 1/2 pages today, that’s close enough.” Nope, you have to complete these tasks in their entirety, including the task of spellchecking the document.
If you don’t complete what you are supposed to, you’ll start to feel like you are off track again – that you are cheating yourself.
To conclude, you might think that by scaling back on the number of tasks will decrease the stuff you get done. I would argue just the opposite. If you normally do 10% here, 10% there on a list of 50 tasks then you are not able to check them off enough to make a dent in them.
Give the 100% Productivity Solution a try and see your most important stuff get done.
{ 2 comments }
Brad, great thoughts here. Thanks for sharing. I am so much enjoying the ideas that you write about. Keep up the good work.
M.
Thanks Michael for your nice words and taking time to comment.