How to Cut Back on the Nonsense Tasks You Do on the Daily.

Life is full of crap.

Emotional crap. Business crap. House crap. Maybe even baby crap.
Most of which you hate to deal with and often find annoying, time-consuming and not productive. You’d rather be working on a clients strategy, playing with your kids, or making a great dinner for you and your partner.

But the crap just keeps staring at you like the old lady you butt in front of in the line at the movies. How do you manage this?

Well, the answer is simple: stop doing one little thing at a time.
Stop washing dishes 5-times a day.
Stop reminding your team of their tasks every single minute.
Stop hitting up the grocery store after work every day.
Stop doing errands all the time.

Instead, do dishes before bed. Have a 10-minute team standup every morning to discuss tasks. Do groceries on Tuesday and Friday. Create an Evernote file for your errands and only do them on Saturdays.

If you can take away one awfully dreaded task each week, you will work your way up to gaining hours of freedom each month.  After all, multitasking is killing you. And if the Eisenhower Matrix (below) is something  you've tried and failed at (I am guilty of that too), then perhaps you need to move on.

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While the matrix above is great for some tasks (especially team and/or work-related tasks), sometimes it won’t easily apply to family or household tasks. So, I’ve developed a way to make it work for every situation. Enter: The Task Elimination Grid.

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Here are the simple steps to get started:

  1. Write down three things you do everyday/week that you HATE doing.
  2. Of those three things, explain two reasons why you hate doing them.
  3. Of those three tasks, define two solid solutions for each task that you can outsource or chunk immediately.
  4. Include a date when this will come into effect.

Example:

  1. Doing the dishes
    • Time waste
    • Hurts my hands
      • Solution 1: Run an extra load in the dishwasher
      • Effective Date: January 1st
      • Solution 2: Only do dishes 1/day
      • Effective Date: January 1st
  2. Folding Laundry
    • I’d rather be playing with my kids    
    • Makes my brain numb
      • Solution 1: Re-wear clothes more often
      • Effective Date: January 7th
      • Solution 2: Schedule two laundry days/week (Tuesday for sheets and towels and Saturdays for clothes)
      • Effective Date: January 7th
  3. Asking the team to submit their hours.
    • They should be doing it without my nagging
    • Makes me angry and/or frustrated
      • Solution 1: Create calendar invite to remind them every Friday at 4:30 pm
      • Effective Date: January 2nd
      • Solution 2: Points system for those that consistently submit their hours on time
      • Effective Date: January 15th

As you start eliminating tasks, you will start to gain more clarity on the things that matter -- AND how and when you should be doing the other ‘crap’.

Face it, you will still be staring at some ugly day-to-day things you have to do that you just can’t avoid, but if you create a system on how to manage them, you will gain more freedom. But you need to stick to it and, perhaps more importantly, you have to be ok with delegating some stuff. Now’s the time, rig
ht?

Go!
 

Photo by Aki Tolentino on Unsplash