3632: [Part 2] Overwhelmed? Eliminate Work by Reorganizing It by Tyler Tervooren of Riskology

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[00:01:00] [SPEAKER_00] This is Optimal Living Daily. Overwhelmed? Eliminate work by reorganizing it. Part 2, by Tyler Tavorin of Riskology.co. And I'm Justin Malek. Welcome back or welcome for the first time if you're new here. This is where I read to you like a big ongoing audiobook from many different authors. But today being a continuation from yesterday, so I'd recommend listening to yesterday's episode first.

[00:01:24] [SPEAKER_00] Make a lot more sense then. If you're all caught up though, let's get right to part 2 and continue optimizing your life. Overwhelmed? Eliminate work by reorganizing it. Part 2, by Tyler Tavorin of Riskology.co. Problem number 2. You're working in the wrong order. This is a problem that causes an equal amount of havoc, but you also have a lot of control over.

[00:01:53] [SPEAKER_00] If you've never spent a day or more thinking hard about the order of the work you do, and how you prioritize your time, you can be sure you're wasting a lot of it. The problem I faced was two-fold. First, the time I spent doing wrong work ruined productive work time in the future. Second, I was so focused on keeping up that I didn't have time to work on actually solving the problem.

[00:02:18] [SPEAKER_00] We're human. We're hardwired to focus on what hurts and then go for easy short-term gains. For me, that meant the first thing I focused on each day was making the pain of the overstuffed support box go away. It was so relieving to see the inbox empty. But what I ignored was all the long-term work I could have been doing to make the pain go away forever.

[00:02:40] [SPEAKER_00] By laser focusing on squashing a small problem each day, I was ensuring the root problem would never actually be addressed. Solution number 2. Build systems that eliminate work. The fix for this problem is obvious. Focus on the big picture ahead of the urgent. But it's also hard to actually do when the pain of doing wrong work is front and center.

[00:03:06] [SPEAKER_00] Funny enough, what helped me start to solve this problem was a meltdown. One day I woke up and I could not get myself to answer support tickets. I gave myself three failing pep talks before giving up and watching Netflix all day, too defeated to do anything else. When I opened the support box the next morning, dreading what I would find, something unexpected happened. The world indeed had not ended. Sure, there were more tickets than usual, but nothing had gone wrong.

[00:03:36] [SPEAKER_00] There were no problems that came in yesterday that couldn't be fixed today, and no one was so impatient they couldn't wait a day for a reply. It's not ideal to make customers wait, but this was an incredible discovery for me. I instantly gained a free morning every other day. And I used that extra time to beef up our knowledge base, format automated replies for common questions, and fix other systems that lowered customers' need for support in the first place. It was like magic to me.

[00:04:05] [SPEAKER_00] All of a sudden, life was infinitely better. I had more time to do what I was good at, and that work translated to the creation of less work I was bad at. If I hadn't had that panic-induced breakdown, I might not have realized it. It's difficult to do, but when you force yourself to prioritize your right work, it can actually reduce the amount of wrong work you need to do forever. Examples in real life

[00:04:31] [SPEAKER_00] I've used a personal example to illustrate how doing wrong work nearly broke me, and how reprioritizing led to salvation. But you might wonder where you can put this to use in your life. The opportunities are endless, but here are just a few that you have complete control over right now. Number one, paying bills. If you find yourself constantly juggling funds between accounts while forgetting to pay bills,

[00:04:57] [SPEAKER_00] this is an area ripe with opportunity for improvement. Sit down on a weekend and pick one account you'll spend money from. Set up every bill you can on auto-pay and transfer enough cash to remove worry about checking and juggling funds every other day. Number two, grocery shopping. Always struggle to find time to go grocery shopping? Don't know what to buy when you do?

[00:05:23] [SPEAKER_00] Take a 24-hour fast and spend the time you'd normally spend eating building a meal plan. Find easy recipes and build a system so you always know what you're eating for the next seven days. Grocery shopping will become easy and you'll never waste time wondering what to eat. And number three, running errands, doing unexpected tasks. Life is filled with small to-dos that pop up at inconvenient times.

[00:05:49] [SPEAKER_00] If you focus on the short-term, you might stop everything to try to fix the problem when it comes up. But if you were to take a long-term view, you might set aside a specific time each week to work on unexpected tasks and ignore small things that come up until then. Keep a list of what needs to get done and batch it all together in one predetermined session. And this is but a tiny fraction of all the opportunities in your life to refocus yourself on your right work

[00:06:18] [SPEAKER_00] so that the wrong work becomes less urgent or goes away entirely. Put it to use at home and you start seeing ways to introduce it at work. Final thoughts on reorganizing your work. As I think about the things that help me take control of my overwhelming to-do lists, the words that come to mind the most are focus and systems. When I force myself to focus on the big picture, I'm always happier with the results

[00:06:45] [SPEAKER_00] because it usually means getting rid of many smaller frustrations. And a system for managing things I must do but don't want to removes the pain of figuring out how to do them or make time for them. Both of those things add up to having very little wrong work to do each day and the little that's left is no longer overwhelming. It can be done without thinking too much. It's made every day tremendously more enjoyable for me.

[00:07:12] [SPEAKER_00] If you see a little bit of yourself in the struggle I faced, I hope the solutions here make your life better too. You just listened to part two of the post titled, Overwhelmed? Eliminate Work by Reorganizing It by Tyler DeVoren of Riskology.co. And I'll be right back with my commentary. If you're having trouble finding the perfect gift for the father figures in our lives, check out Cozy Earth.

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[00:09:35] [SPEAKER_00] Shopify.com slash old. Thank you again to Tyler. He talked about how he was so focused on emptying that support inbox every day that he didn't have time to build the systems that would actually reduce the support tickets in the first place. I think that's the classic urgent versus important battle. So easy to get caught up in putting out the little fires right in front of us that we never get around to the root cause.

[00:10:04] [SPEAKER_00] Reminds me a bit of when I first committed to tracking all my finances way back in 2010. Initially, the urgent part each day or every few days was just making sure I got every transaction listed in that spreadsheet. And if I got behind, it felt like that pain he described, this nagging task I had to catch up on. But just doing that daily logging, that was like him clearing the support inbox.

[00:10:29] [SPEAKER_00] It didn't solve the bigger picture of truly understanding my spending or making tax time easier. So the real game changer, the solution number two, builds systems that eliminate work that he talks about. That came when I finally set up a solid system using an app that does most of the work for you. I use YNAB. Took some effort upfront to learn it and get it all set up, but now pretty much does the work for me.

[00:10:55] [SPEAKER_00] So by the way, if you want to try it, just visit oldpodcast.com slash track. Thank you again to Tyler for this one. Thank you for being here, of course. If you enjoyed it, please share the show with someone. It goes a long way to keep this going. Have a great rest of your day and I'll be back tomorrow as usual, where your optimal life awaits.