4008: How To Prioritize Effectively by Carl Pullein on Focused Productivity

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[00:01:00] [SPEAKER_02] This is Optimal Living Daily. How to Prioritize Effectively by Carl Pullein of carlpullein.com. And I'm Justin Malik. And we're going to get right to it and continue optimizing your life. How to Prioritize Effectively by Carl Pullein of carlpullein.com.

[00:01:23] [SPEAKER_02] Let's begin with a fact. You have far more tasks to complete than time available. You'll never change that unless you are prepared to give up everything. Your work, your family, and friends, and live in the middle of a desert. Beginning with this fact, we need to find a way to make sure the tasks we do each day are meaningful, move projects and goals forward, and leave us feeling satisfied at the end of the day.

[00:01:47] [SPEAKER_02] Prioritization starts at the top. The art of prioritization begins at a higher level. You need to know what you want. What do you want to achieve with your career or business, your social and family life, and your own goals? Being clear about these makes decision-making easier. If you do not know what you want, you'll find that everything that comes across your desk is a priority because there is no context to decide.

[00:02:11] [SPEAKER_02] You'll revert to basic human needs, the need to please, and the fear of missing out, FOMO, none of which lead you anywhere positive. For instance, your health and fitness. No matter where you are with your health, all of us need to make sure we are protecting it. If we are a bit overweight, we must act to reduce our weight. If our diet is a mess and we are eating far too many toxic foods, processed grains, sugar, and refined carbohydrates, we need to take steps to remove these from our diet.

[00:02:39] [SPEAKER_02] Once you know what you want, what's important to you, and these are embedded as repeating non-negotiable tasks in your task manager, the next step is to make decisions about the work you do. This is likely where your most variable tasks come from. Understanding your core work. Here, you need to know what your core work is. What are you employed to do? The clue is often in your job title. Are you a salesperson, a teacher, a designer, illustrator, or a lawyer?

[00:03:07] [SPEAKER_02] Your core work in these examples is to sell, teach, design, illustrate, or provide legal advice. This means that you are doing what you are paid to do whenever you are selling, teaching, or designing. When you are called into town hall meetings by your boss or asked to complete time-consuming sales reports, you are not doing your core work. I would even go as far as to argue teachers completing attendance reports are not doing their core work. Attendance reports help admin staff. They don't help the people you are teaching to learn anything.

[00:03:37] [SPEAKER_02] In great companies, you don't get promotions or pay raises because you are good at gossiping or fast at replying to messages and emails. You get promoted based on your results doing the work you are employed to do. Make sure you are prioritizing the work you are employed to do. Spend a good part of your workday in front of your customers and potential customers, or designing products, or teaching and developing teaching materials that will benefit your students. Any work related to these activities will always be your priority.

[00:04:07] [SPEAKER_02] Once you know what you want, what you are employed to do, and make sure your daily activities are focused on these, you will quickly learn where your focus is best applied. Make sure you use your calendar to block sufficient time out to do this work. The sales example. Imagine you are a salesperson. Your job is to sell, so you would block out two or three hours each working day to focus on contacting prospective customers and clients. Your pipeline. You would also schedule a good part of your day to talk with your existing customers.

[00:04:37] [SPEAKER_02] That takes care of your core work. However, while doing sales admin and responding to non-sales related emails may not be part of your core work, they are still a part of your job, so you would dedicate a fixed amount of time for dealing with your admin and communications. Managed well, you would have plenty of time each day for each of these activities while prioritizing the work that drives your core work forward. Automatic prioritization.

[00:05:02] [SPEAKER_02] When you are clear about what you want and have defined core work activities, prioritizing becomes almost automatic. Any task or activity that does not directly support either of those will not be a priority. Bringing all this together is the weekly and daily planning sessions. During these sessions, you review your tasks, the commitments you have, and decide where best to apply your time. Again, you base these decisions on how any of these requests or activities will assist you with your goals and core work.

[00:05:32] [SPEAKER_02] Prioritizing is not a science. It is an art. You'll get better the more you practice it. Knowing what you want, what you are employed to do, and being disciplined enough to make sure you spend most of your time working on these activities will lead you down roads that take you to greater heights with a lot less stress. You just listened to the post titled, How to Prioritize Effectively, by Carl Pullein of carlpullein.com. I'll be right back with my commentary.

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[00:06:59] [SPEAKER_02] Take it a car all. A nice practical one. The big idea here is worth thinking about. Prioritization can only work when you know what you're actually trying to do. Without that, everything feels equally urgent and you just end up reacting to whatever's in front of you or whoever's asking most recently. I like the core work framing idea. What are you actually here to do?

[00:07:26] [SPEAKER_02] What does your job, your role, and your day actually revolve around? Because if most of your time is going toward things that aren't that, like meetings or email and so on, you might be staying busy without really moving the needle. I think this connects to the bigger theme of this show. A lot of what we talk about with values, goals, and knowing what matters is really just different angles on the same question. What do you want?

[00:07:55] [SPEAKER_02] Because once you can answer that clearly, a lot of the smaller decisions become much easier. So maybe today, just ask yourself, what is my core work? Not the stuff that fills my day, but the stuff that really matters. And then ask how much of today went toward that. You might find the answer is either reassuring or really eye-opening. Hopefully that helps. But I'll leave it there for today. I appreciate you being here and listening. Thank you for that.

[00:08:23] [SPEAKER_02] Have a great rest of your day and I'll see you tomorrow where your optimal life awaits.