31. How to Prioritize Your Work
The topic of work prioritization might not strike you as an especially sexy or fun topic, but I love it and it makes a HUGE impact on what you get done and how you feel at the end of your day.
I know that many of you are feeling stressed and overwhelmed, like you have too much work to even prioritize, and we’re going to get to that, too. Women are socialized to do until there’s nothing left to do, and to do everything really well, and this socialization can bite us in the ass when it comes getting our work done. Why? Because many women spend way too much time perfecting work that doesn’t actually need to be perfect and completing work that isn’t actually essential to the role we’re in or the main outcomes we’re working to achieve.
What’s the solution to this? Thinking intentionally about which work matters most and then prioritizing that work. But this is easier said than done. In order to do this, we also have to teach our brains that it’s ok not to do everything perfectly and that sometimes the best thing we can do is leave some work unfinished. (Does this last bit make you want to break out in hives? That used to be me. But figuring out which things NOT to do is as important as figuring out which things TO DO.)
If you believe you don’t have enough time to get everything done, and you get stressed and panicked when you look at your to-do list, this week’s episode is exactly what you need. I’ll teach you a simple framework for thinking through your to do list and getting your most essential work done. Check it out and then report back about how much better you feel when you organize your work this way!
If you love the podcast and want to take this work deeper, I have great news! I have space for new one-to-one coaching clients starting this month, so click here to schedule a call with me and we’ll see if we’re a good fit to start working together!
If there are topics y’all want me to teach and talk about on the podcast, feel free to write in and let me know by clicking here! I’d love to hear from you!
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:
Why the way you prioritize work truly matters.
Where people lose efficiency, spending time on things they shouldn’t necessarily be prioritizing.
Why we all want to do more things than we actually have time for.
The importance of thinking further out and being more strategic in your approach.
Why there is no room for perfectionism in the process of prioritizing your work.
My simple approach to calendaring the tasks I have decided to prioritize.
How to prioritize your work in a way that moves you forward and gives you time to work on what’s really important.
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:
FEATURED ON THE SHOW:
If you’re enjoying the show, please leave me a rating and review on Apple Podcasts!
Feel free to ask me any questions over on Instagram!
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Steven Covey
FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
This week we’re talking about how to prioritize your work.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving women who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hey y'all, how are you on this fine Wednesday? I am doing well. But before we get into our topic today, I wanted to tell you all about a conversation I have with one of my clients. So one of my clients told me that the title of my podcast is kind of, I don't remember the exact words she used. It wasn't a smackdown but like kind of a smackdown like, love your job or else. And I just wanted to take a minute to speak to that because y'all might feel that way too. And I want to be really honest, that you don't have to love your job. Like and you don't have to love it all the time. And that's not actually the goal.
The goal is for you to be able to love your job. Like I want you to have the option of loving your job. I want you to know, it's something you can do that doesn't depend on your job. Like your job doesn't have to be a certain way for you to have an amazing experience of it. And I think that's actually a really radical idea because I think so many of us think that like a job is either good or bad. A boss is either good or bad. A workplace is toxic or it's awesome, or it’s like blah, it’s in the middle.
And the stuff we teach and talk about on this podcast is really revolutionary and radical in some ways because it's taking all the power back from the job, from your boss, from your co-workers, from the workplace, from the environment, and it's giving it all squarely back to you.
Now, with great power comes great responsibility. That's a quote, I don't know who said it. But I think it applies here because when we take back the power and we decide like, I can love my job here or anywhere, then we also have the responsibility of creating that love if that's what we want.
Again, not what you have to do. And I don't want it just to become another should that you like layer upon yourself like, “Oh, now I have to like love my job or I'm doing a bad job.” That's not what this is about at all. I just want you to know that you can and be able to do that and be able to have this skill set to do it so that it's always available to you.
And as part of saying this I want to just give y'all a little spoiler alert, which I actually was posting about an Instagram. Which if you don't follow me, come follow me @korilinn, it's super fun over there. Bring me all your questions and recommendations and topics you'd like me to cover for the podcast. That's why I was posting over there. And what I posted was I don't always love my job. I'm the queen of love your fucking job. And listen, I don't always love my job. But the thing is, I know that it's not because of my job. I have the most amazing job, I designed this job, this job is so good. I get to help amazing people create more of what they want at work and in life. There's nothing fucking better than that, as far as I'm concerned.
But I don't always love it and I don't think that's a problem. Because while I want to have the skill of loving my job, and I want to know how to do that, and I want to be empowered to know that I can always create that for myself, that doesn't mean I always have to create it. That doesn't mean that's always the headspace I have to be in when I work. It’s always available to me but it's not a requirement. It's not pressure, it's not another way in which I have to perform or be a good person. It's just something I can do. And I often do do it because it's fun. And some days I'm like, “I'll just run my business on commitment today.” Or “I'll run my business on fun today.” Or “I'll run my business on courage today, because maybe I'm doing something that really aligns with my values, but that I'm also scared about.” So love is always available. I know how to create it, it's an inside job, but it's not a requirement. And it certainly should not be, or I would invite you not to have it be another measuring stick that you use to like beat yourself up with. That's not what the fuck we're doing here y'all, that is not that what we're doing.
So if what you want is to love your job, what if you want is to like think you have the most fucking amazing job in the world and to think you're super fucking good at it, this podcast can for sure help you do that. And it's okay if you don't always want to do that. My own coach, Kara Loewentheil, says all the time like you can accomplish a lot with a half-managed mind.
So when we do coaching and use coaching tools in the industry, we call that managing your mind. But it's not like we have to be doing that all the time. If I managed my mind about my job that I designed, that I love, half the time, that's enough. Even if I only do it a quarter of the time.
And even if you only manage your mind about your job a quarter of the time, 10% of the time. Even if you only take one thing I teach on the podcast and then apply that to your business, that can make a huge difference. And that can be enough.
Like we're not doing perfection here y'all. I say this all the time. But like if you're trying to take what you learn on this podcast, and then do perfectionism with it, that's not what we're doing here. And it doesn't work because perfectionism, no matter what we achieve with it, we just feel like shit.
So don't put pressure on yourself to love your job. Just invite yourself to consider that you have the power, the authority, the agency, to create a better experience of your job. And that can be super fun to do. It's not like a have to do, it's just something that's available.
Okay, that's enough about that. I want to talk to y'all about prioritization. Super sexy, right? I mean, I think it's sexy, but I think a lot of people don't. So we talked recently about time and about spending time versus investing time. But this topic is a little bit different. And it's about like how to choose which tasks to do and then when to do them. Maybe we'll dabble a little in calendaring also. But it's not going to be like a full deep dive on how to use a calendar. If y'all want that maybe we'll do a future episode, send me an email, let me know.
So the first thing I want to talk about is something I actually learned from Stephen Covey, who is the author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. And he taught me about this concept, I don't remember what it's called, but it's basically like a square. And the square is subdivided into four squares. One square is things that are urgent, but not important. One square is things that are urgent and important. One square is things that are important, but not urgent. And one square is things that are neither important nor urgent.
And from what I remember of Stephen Covey's book, which I read approximately a million years ago, a lot of people spend their time in the urgent zone, regardless of whether things are important or not important. So they do things that are urgent, some of those things may be important, some of them may not be important, but they're urgent. And a lot of people don't spend enough time in the important but not urgent zone.
So a lot of people when they're thinking about what to do and which work to prioritize, if they're not thinking about it intentionally, they will prioritize what's urgent. And this is how a lot of people run their workflow, run their calendar. They do it based on what's urgent, what needs to get done, what needs to get out the door.
Versus thinking further out and being strategic and making plans about like, what's actually the most important thing? Is this urgent stuff actually important? What's going to create the outcome I want or like what's going to be the most essential for creating the outcome I want? If I have 10 things to do, but only room to do four things, which four things do I need to do and how do I need to handle those other six if I'm not going to be able to get them done?
So something I see again and again with my clients and something I saw again, again with myself back when I worked in corporate and also sometimes still with myself and my business is that we will want to do more things than we can technically actually fit into the time that we have. And it is true that we can use coaching and thought work to become more effective in our work and then we can fit more things in.
But in the beginning, I think it makes more sense to decide how much time we have and then just select that amount of things and put it in there and do those things in that amount of time and get really good at that. And then once we're good at that we can compress and get better at streamlining some of the stuff we're doing.
Now I have a caveat about this, so I want to make it really clear. I don't mean how many things can you do on your calendar if you're being a complete fucking perfectionist about them and trying to do A plus work. That's not what the fuck I'm talking about right now, y'all.
I'm talking about how many things can I do that I can do what I'm going to call like a lazy A version of. And to be clear, I don't think like lazy is a useful term generally, but I really love this idea of the lazy A.
So when I was young, that's the kind of A I was always trying to get. Like I do identify as a perfectionist, but when I was in like, let's say middle school, I actually don't think I was as much of a perfectionist then. And so I was always trying to do just enough work to get an A.
Not an A minus, I didn't want to be in that like 90 to 92 zone, I wanted the A. And that was because those were the grades that I was expected to get in my household and rewarded for getting and would get consequences if I did not get them.
So that was like kind of my methodology. And I remember like I would sometimes do like mathematical equations to be like, “Okay, here's my current grade in the class. This final is worth like XYZ percentage of the grade, so what's the lowest score I can get on the final and still get the A?”
So all of that little story is just to say, when you're thinking about calendaring there is the urgent versus the important thing to consider. But then there's also how many things can I put on my calendar if I'm doing like the lazy A. If I'm not trying to be a total perfectionist and I'm just trying to do like a good enough job at this, how many things can I fit?
So a lot of people, like I said, will do the urgent work regardless of whether it's important or not. And I think a lot of us do this because we get in this headspace of like, I don't have enough time.
When people think they don't have enough time, first of all, they think they're like observing a truth of the universe. It's not a truth of the universe, it's a perception you have. And that perception actually creates a lot of stress and panic. And when people feel stress and panic, they actually generally don't make the most intentional best choices about what work they're doing.
So if everything feels like, as we used to call it in corporate, a fire alarm, like it feels like a fucking emergency, then your brain will just do all the emergency things without necessarily pausing to go, “Wait, how essential are these four things? Like do they actually need to get done? Do they need to get done by me? Could someone else do them? What's the most important thing to my job to get done today?”
So a lot of people tend to do the urgent things. They will do the urgent important things also, they'll do the urgent not important things, they'll do the urgent important things. But then the things that are important, but not urgent, a lot of people will not do those until they become urgent.
And if you want to, you can totally run your calendar that way. But 12 out of 10 I do not recommend, because then it always feels like your to-do list or calendar is full of emergencies, your inbox is full of emergencies. Everything's a fucking emergency, everything's urgent. And that's when people get into that headspace of like, I don't have enough time, there's always too much to do.
Instead I like to think about overall planning. And this is like where this ties back into investing your time versus spending your time. So what I'm talking about here, this is a time investment, right?
That first we sit down, and we think about all the things on our plate to do. And we think about the urgent things that are not important, but our brain wants to do because they're “urgent”. We think about the urgent things that are important. And then we think about the important things that are not urgent.
And then I want you to like write all those down. And then I want you to ask yourself, what's actually the most important thing? Is it something that's urgent and important? Or is it actually something that's important that's not urgent yet, that your brain doesn't even want to think about doing yet? Like, what's the most important thing for me to get done in my work right now?
So how much of what's urgent is actually important? Write down all the things right now that feel really urgent. And then ask yourself like, does this shit actually matter? Does it actually matter at all? Like maybe we just ditch it completely. Maybe it seems urgent, but we're like, wait, we don't have to do that.
Like there is work like that that exists that people will get very spun up about. And then at the end of the day, it doesn't actually matter to them doing their job at all. Sometimes it's not even their job. Like people will be like, “Well, this is urgent, but it's not my job at all.” But they're about to like not do six important tasks on their to-do list to go do this other work that's not actually their job.
So like that's where the is it urgent versus important can come in handy. And a question that I've heard asked in coaching calls that I really love is like, what can I ditch? What can I delegate? What can I do a worse job on? Right?
So I'm all about that lazy A like I was talking about, but some things don't need a lazy A. Some things just need like a C, right? Not everything needs to be done well. And listen, if you want to do everything well, like I get it, I feel that way also. But time is finite, right? So if it's like I can do my important work really well or I can like write my grocery list really clearly with no fuck ups, like the grocery list, obviously, who cares? If I have to scratch some words out or if I like miss something, like it's not ideal, it's not what I prefer.
But I want to be really intentional about where I'm bringing my best energy and my most focused energy. And there's a lot of stuff in my life I can just stop doing entirely and get someone else to do it, because it doesn't actually require my expertise and intelligence and specific set of skills and knowledge. Or I can just do a worse job on it because it's not something that needs to be like high quality necessarily.
Like I used to always fix all the typos in my text messages. And sometimes I still do it but one thing I've realized is I can just send a text with a typo in it. Often people will understand what it means, and they probably won't even think less of me if I have a typo in a text message, especially if it's one of my friends. But that's an area where like my particular brain wants to be a super perfectionist and like make sure it has like all the appropriate commas and all the appropriate, you know, like apostrophes. And I can do that, but is it the best use of my time? Maybe not. I get to choose and I'm choosing that it's not.
So when it comes to your workload, like this all sounds good and well, but like, how do you actually apply this to your workload? Here's what I want you to do, draw the little squares, right? Draw the little squares I talked about at the beginning. Like urgent and important, urgent and not important, important but not urgent, not important and not urgent, and put the shit that you have to do, “have to do” into those squares.
And then just like look at that, right, so you can understand what are all the things that are like on your plate or in your brain. That actually is already going to be helpful because a lot of us like kind of are carrying around our to-do list in our head or like on 87 little, tiny scraps of paper.
So even getting it all written down in one place is going to help. And categorizing it is going to be useful too. Probably just categorizing it there's going to be stuff that you're like, “I'm not going to fucking do that. I don't need to do that. It doesn't need to get done by me.”
But then beyond that like a lot of my clients are busy, important, smart people with like, very fancy jobs. So there might be 10 important things that need to get done and they might have room for five. So in that case, even if there are 10 things that are important, you still have like a limited amount of slots to fill.
So I like to start with, like if I could only do three things, which things would I choose? Which things matter the most, and in what order? Because if you have like 10 or 37 things in your little squares, that's kind of a lot of data for the brain to process. When we limit it to three that's really going to constrain things for our brain, it's going to help our brain focus in.
And if you have room for more than three, you can just do three, and then you can do three more up until how many spaces you have. But if you're like, “Oh, what are the top 12 things?” That's going to be a more challenging analysis for your brain to perform. So start with three or even start with one. If I could only do one thing on here, what matters more than everything else?
Like I'm a coach, I have a coaching business. I work with my clients on calls, and I work with my clients in the Slack. If I could only do one thing because like I had some interruption to my day or whatever or like if I had to like constrain my day down to one thing that matters most, it’s my coaching calls. The thing that matters the most after that is the coaching Slack. Right?
I love y'all and I love recording the podcast. But I would put that after, it would still be important even when it's not urgent, but I would put it after the coaching calls with my own clients. So that's an example of how to do that.
And then let's just take a minute to talk about the calendar. Now there are like lots of different ways you can do this. And a lot of coaches have methodologies that they teach, I have a methodology and it's much more simple than a lot of people's.
So, I just pick the things that are important that I'm going to do. And then I just put them on the calendar in the slots I have available. Right? So I don't sort them into projects. I don't like organize them and I don't calendar my full day out. Like I don't like write the full to-do list, put every single thing onto the calendar and then throw it away.
I write the list, I pull it out of my head, and then I decide like what are the most important things and then I put those on there. And then if there's time leftover, then I put increasingly less important things.
But a note, like don't cram your calendar to busting, right? A lot of people do that too. And then at the end of the day they're completely exhausted because they're not giving themselves time to like be a human being in a human body that needs to like drink water and go to the bathroom and do stuff.
So when you're doing your calendar, if you're doing that, I think it's really useful to also calendar in breaks. Actually, a lot of coaches, and I think this is a really good idea, suggest for you to calendar in your breaks and your pleasure and your free time first. And that way if you are letting your work run over you can see really clearly what you're losing when you do that.
Like I said, I kind of have a much more simple method than a lot of people. So I just tend to think in like, here's 45 minutes of work. And then I give myself 15 minutes to like do whatever whether it's like get up and go to the bathroom. Or like make a cup of, I'm not actually drinking coffee right now because my body has been rejecting it, but like make a cup of tea or something like that.
And I also calendar and like a walk during my day and I calendar in my lunch. Because if I don't do that, then I'll forget to eat and then I'll be starving, hungry on a coaching call and nobody wants to get coached by a hangry coach. That's like not a super fun thing to have happen.
Okay, so to recap, when you're thinking about how to prioritize your tasks, I highly suggest that you use the Stephen Covey tool that I talked about. Where you ask yourself about whether the tasks are urgent or important and put them into one of those four categories.
And then from there you think about if I can only do three things, which would I do if I could only do three things? Which would I do and in what order? And then you use that information to stick the things on your actual calendar.
Now, I know a lot of y'all have a lot of meetings, I've worked in corporate, I used to also have a lot of meetings. And actually, I still have a lot of meetings because that's what my coaching calls are. Technically I'm having Zoom meetings all day with lovely humans, helping them figure out how to create more meaning and satisfaction in their work lives, right?
But what I see is that people will have like six hours of meetings, and they'll still want to get like eight hours of knowledge work done. That's not going to work. That is not how math works.
If you have six hours of meetings, then you have two hours left where you can schedule other things if you're in an eight hour workday. If that's not going to be enough time then you get to ask yourself like, “Do I need to cancel some of these meetings? Do I need to reset expectations about what I can get done?”
I'm seeing all the time people trying to do basically like 16 hours of work in eight hours of time. And like I was saying before, coaching tools can definitely make you more effective, they can help you streamline, and they can help reduce how much time it takes to do specific tasks. But before you can do that, you need to be honest with yourself about your current capacity, right?
It's kind of like lifting weights, you have to be honest with yourself about how much weights you can lift. Because if you try to lift weights that you can't lift, that's not going to make you stronger, you're just not going to be able to pick it up. Or you're going to injure yourself, right?
So before you can get more effective at how long it takes you to do a task, you have to get more effective at choosing your tasks, and calendaring those tasks, and then doing them during the time that's calendared.
And, like I also mentioned, you can put your meetings also on your calendar through the urgent versus important framework and then decide if you want to keep the meetings or not. Like you might discover that 30% of your meetings are neither urgent nor important. And then you might be like I'm not going to go to these anymore.
And if you've discovered they're neither urgent or important, and you know which of your tasks are urgent and important, or are important but not urgent, it becomes a lot easier to have a conversation with other people about the way you're going to choose to spend your time.
Like it's one thing to just cancel a meeting and be like, “I don't want to go anymore.” I mean, you're certainly allowed to do that. If you remember the podcast on like making requests, I don't think it's like the most useful way to communicate at work.
Versus if you're like, “Hey manager person, like I did some analysis and I found that I've been spending this much time in these meetings, and they are neither urgent nor important. And instead, I would like to be doing these tasks and these tasks and these things. And this is what I think the appropriate prioritization is.”
Like you're taking ownership of making sure you're getting your important work done, and you're communicating that up, and you're showing that you've thought it through and you're trying to use the company's resource, which is you, in the way that's going to give the company the most benefit. And it's also going to allow you to do a really good job without trying to expect yourself to be able to be in meetings six hours a day and also get eight hours of work done. The math is just not gonna work, y’all.
And it doesn't need to, like you don't need to do that to like, provide a lot of value at your company and to get important work done at a high level. I actually think you're going to get so much more important work done and done really well when you prioritize your work and use your calendar to create space to do that work without trying to cram it all in there and stressing yourself out in the process.
All right, that was like kind of a lot, I think. So if you have more questions about prioritization and how to use the calendar, write in and tell me about it, because I can always do a follow up if you want more information.
And if you love what I teach, and you want some help taking things a little bit deeper and figuring out how this all applies to your own life, I've got good news for you. I've got space for a few new one on one coaching clients starting this month. So let's hop on a call. I'll give you some coaching right away to help you get going. And if it seems like a good fit, I will share with you how we can work together. Just head on over to my website and click on the work with me button and get started there.
Also, bonus, my coaching offering is totally virtual so as to better serve my global audience. And yes, I do work with people who are not native English speakers and we've had great success doing that. There's even a testimonial on my website with someone in that category so you can check that out on the testimonials page. All right y'all, have a lovely week and I will talk to you next time. Bye.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving women who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hey y'all, how are you on this fine Wednesday? I am doing well. But before we get into our topic today, I wanted to tell you all about a conversation I have with one of my clients. So one of my clients told me that the title of my podcast is kind of, I don't remember the exact words she used. It wasn't a smackdown but like kind of a smackdown like, love your job or else. And I just wanted to take a minute to speak to that because y'all might feel that way too. And I want to be really honest, that you don't have to love your job. Like and you don't have to love it all the time. And that's not actually the goal.
The goal is for you to be able to love your job. Like I want you to have the option of loving your job. I want you to know, it's something you can do that doesn't depend on your job. Like your job doesn't have to be a certain way for you to have an amazing experience of it. And I think that's actually a really radical idea because I think so many of us think that like a job is either good or bad. A boss is either good or bad. A workplace is toxic or it's awesome, or it’s like blah, it’s in the middle.
And the stuff we teach and talk about on this podcast is really revolutionary and radical in some ways because it's taking all the power back from the job, from your boss, from your co-workers, from the workplace, from the environment, and it's giving it all squarely back to you.
Now, with great power comes great responsibility. That's a quote, I don't know who said it. But I think it applies here because when we take back the power and we decide like, I can love my job here or anywhere, then we also have the responsibility of creating that love if that's what we want.
Again, not what you have to do. And I don't want it just to become another should that you like layer upon yourself like, “Oh, now I have to like love my job or I'm doing a bad job.” That's not what this is about at all. I just want you to know that you can and be able to do that and be able to have this skill set to do it so that it's always available to you.
And as part of saying this I want to just give y'all a little spoiler alert, which I actually was posting about an Instagram. Which if you don't follow me, come follow me @korilinn, it's super fun over there. Bring me all your questions and recommendations and topics you'd like me to cover for the podcast. That's why I was posting over there. And what I posted was I don't always love my job. I'm the queen of love your fucking job. And listen, I don't always love my job. But the thing is, I know that it's not because of my job. I have the most amazing job, I designed this job, this job is so good. I get to help amazing people create more of what they want at work and in life. There's nothing fucking better than that, as far as I'm concerned.
But I don't always love it and I don't think that's a problem. Because while I want to have the skill of loving my job, and I want to know how to do that, and I want to be empowered to know that I can always create that for myself, that doesn't mean I always have to create it. That doesn't mean that's always the headspace I have to be in when I work. It’s always available to me but it's not a requirement. It's not pressure, it's not another way in which I have to perform or be a good person. It's just something I can do. And I often do do it because it's fun. And some days I'm like, “I'll just run my business on commitment today.” Or “I'll run my business on fun today.” Or “I'll run my business on courage today, because maybe I'm doing something that really aligns with my values, but that I'm also scared about.” So love is always available. I know how to create it, it's an inside job, but it's not a requirement. And it certainly should not be, or I would invite you not to have it be another measuring stick that you use to like beat yourself up with. That's not what the fuck we're doing here y'all, that is not that what we're doing.
So if what you want is to love your job, what if you want is to like think you have the most fucking amazing job in the world and to think you're super fucking good at it, this podcast can for sure help you do that. And it's okay if you don't always want to do that. My own coach, Kara Loewentheil, says all the time like you can accomplish a lot with a half-managed mind.
So when we do coaching and use coaching tools in the industry, we call that managing your mind. But it's not like we have to be doing that all the time. If I managed my mind about my job that I designed, that I love, half the time, that's enough. Even if I only do it a quarter of the time.
And even if you only manage your mind about your job a quarter of the time, 10% of the time. Even if you only take one thing I teach on the podcast and then apply that to your business, that can make a huge difference. And that can be enough.
Like we're not doing perfection here y'all. I say this all the time. But like if you're trying to take what you learn on this podcast, and then do perfectionism with it, that's not what we're doing here. And it doesn't work because perfectionism, no matter what we achieve with it, we just feel like shit.
So don't put pressure on yourself to love your job. Just invite yourself to consider that you have the power, the authority, the agency, to create a better experience of your job. And that can be super fun to do. It's not like a have to do, it's just something that's available.
Okay, that's enough about that. I want to talk to y'all about prioritization. Super sexy, right? I mean, I think it's sexy, but I think a lot of people don't. So we talked recently about time and about spending time versus investing time. But this topic is a little bit different. And it's about like how to choose which tasks to do and then when to do them. Maybe we'll dabble a little in calendaring also. But it's not going to be like a full deep dive on how to use a calendar. If y'all want that maybe we'll do a future episode, send me an email, let me know.
So the first thing I want to talk about is something I actually learned from Stephen Covey, who is the author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. And he taught me about this concept, I don't remember what it's called, but it's basically like a square. And the square is subdivided into four squares. One square is things that are urgent, but not important. One square is things that are urgent and important. One square is things that are important, but not urgent. And one square is things that are neither important nor urgent.
And from what I remember of Stephen Covey's book, which I read approximately a million years ago, a lot of people spend their time in the urgent zone, regardless of whether things are important or not important. So they do things that are urgent, some of those things may be important, some of them may not be important, but they're urgent. And a lot of people don't spend enough time in the important but not urgent zone.
So a lot of people when they're thinking about what to do and which work to prioritize, if they're not thinking about it intentionally, they will prioritize what's urgent. And this is how a lot of people run their workflow, run their calendar. They do it based on what's urgent, what needs to get done, what needs to get out the door.
Versus thinking further out and being strategic and making plans about like, what's actually the most important thing? Is this urgent stuff actually important? What's going to create the outcome I want or like what's going to be the most essential for creating the outcome I want? If I have 10 things to do, but only room to do four things, which four things do I need to do and how do I need to handle those other six if I'm not going to be able to get them done?
So something I see again and again with my clients and something I saw again, again with myself back when I worked in corporate and also sometimes still with myself and my business is that we will want to do more things than we can technically actually fit into the time that we have. And it is true that we can use coaching and thought work to become more effective in our work and then we can fit more things in.
But in the beginning, I think it makes more sense to decide how much time we have and then just select that amount of things and put it in there and do those things in that amount of time and get really good at that. And then once we're good at that we can compress and get better at streamlining some of the stuff we're doing.
Now I have a caveat about this, so I want to make it really clear. I don't mean how many things can you do on your calendar if you're being a complete fucking perfectionist about them and trying to do A plus work. That's not what the fuck I'm talking about right now, y'all.
I'm talking about how many things can I do that I can do what I'm going to call like a lazy A version of. And to be clear, I don't think like lazy is a useful term generally, but I really love this idea of the lazy A.
So when I was young, that's the kind of A I was always trying to get. Like I do identify as a perfectionist, but when I was in like, let's say middle school, I actually don't think I was as much of a perfectionist then. And so I was always trying to do just enough work to get an A.
Not an A minus, I didn't want to be in that like 90 to 92 zone, I wanted the A. And that was because those were the grades that I was expected to get in my household and rewarded for getting and would get consequences if I did not get them.
So that was like kind of my methodology. And I remember like I would sometimes do like mathematical equations to be like, “Okay, here's my current grade in the class. This final is worth like XYZ percentage of the grade, so what's the lowest score I can get on the final and still get the A?”
So all of that little story is just to say, when you're thinking about calendaring there is the urgent versus the important thing to consider. But then there's also how many things can I put on my calendar if I'm doing like the lazy A. If I'm not trying to be a total perfectionist and I'm just trying to do like a good enough job at this, how many things can I fit?
So a lot of people, like I said, will do the urgent work regardless of whether it's important or not. And I think a lot of us do this because we get in this headspace of like, I don't have enough time.
When people think they don't have enough time, first of all, they think they're like observing a truth of the universe. It's not a truth of the universe, it's a perception you have. And that perception actually creates a lot of stress and panic. And when people feel stress and panic, they actually generally don't make the most intentional best choices about what work they're doing.
So if everything feels like, as we used to call it in corporate, a fire alarm, like it feels like a fucking emergency, then your brain will just do all the emergency things without necessarily pausing to go, “Wait, how essential are these four things? Like do they actually need to get done? Do they need to get done by me? Could someone else do them? What's the most important thing to my job to get done today?”
So a lot of people tend to do the urgent things. They will do the urgent important things also, they'll do the urgent not important things, they'll do the urgent important things. But then the things that are important, but not urgent, a lot of people will not do those until they become urgent.
And if you want to, you can totally run your calendar that way. But 12 out of 10 I do not recommend, because then it always feels like your to-do list or calendar is full of emergencies, your inbox is full of emergencies. Everything's a fucking emergency, everything's urgent. And that's when people get into that headspace of like, I don't have enough time, there's always too much to do.
Instead I like to think about overall planning. And this is like where this ties back into investing your time versus spending your time. So what I'm talking about here, this is a time investment, right?
That first we sit down, and we think about all the things on our plate to do. And we think about the urgent things that are not important, but our brain wants to do because they're “urgent”. We think about the urgent things that are important. And then we think about the important things that are not urgent.
And then I want you to like write all those down. And then I want you to ask yourself, what's actually the most important thing? Is it something that's urgent and important? Or is it actually something that's important that's not urgent yet, that your brain doesn't even want to think about doing yet? Like, what's the most important thing for me to get done in my work right now?
So how much of what's urgent is actually important? Write down all the things right now that feel really urgent. And then ask yourself like, does this shit actually matter? Does it actually matter at all? Like maybe we just ditch it completely. Maybe it seems urgent, but we're like, wait, we don't have to do that.
Like there is work like that that exists that people will get very spun up about. And then at the end of the day, it doesn't actually matter to them doing their job at all. Sometimes it's not even their job. Like people will be like, “Well, this is urgent, but it's not my job at all.” But they're about to like not do six important tasks on their to-do list to go do this other work that's not actually their job.
So like that's where the is it urgent versus important can come in handy. And a question that I've heard asked in coaching calls that I really love is like, what can I ditch? What can I delegate? What can I do a worse job on? Right?
So I'm all about that lazy A like I was talking about, but some things don't need a lazy A. Some things just need like a C, right? Not everything needs to be done well. And listen, if you want to do everything well, like I get it, I feel that way also. But time is finite, right? So if it's like I can do my important work really well or I can like write my grocery list really clearly with no fuck ups, like the grocery list, obviously, who cares? If I have to scratch some words out or if I like miss something, like it's not ideal, it's not what I prefer.
But I want to be really intentional about where I'm bringing my best energy and my most focused energy. And there's a lot of stuff in my life I can just stop doing entirely and get someone else to do it, because it doesn't actually require my expertise and intelligence and specific set of skills and knowledge. Or I can just do a worse job on it because it's not something that needs to be like high quality necessarily.
Like I used to always fix all the typos in my text messages. And sometimes I still do it but one thing I've realized is I can just send a text with a typo in it. Often people will understand what it means, and they probably won't even think less of me if I have a typo in a text message, especially if it's one of my friends. But that's an area where like my particular brain wants to be a super perfectionist and like make sure it has like all the appropriate commas and all the appropriate, you know, like apostrophes. And I can do that, but is it the best use of my time? Maybe not. I get to choose and I'm choosing that it's not.
So when it comes to your workload, like this all sounds good and well, but like, how do you actually apply this to your workload? Here's what I want you to do, draw the little squares, right? Draw the little squares I talked about at the beginning. Like urgent and important, urgent and not important, important but not urgent, not important and not urgent, and put the shit that you have to do, “have to do” into those squares.
And then just like look at that, right, so you can understand what are all the things that are like on your plate or in your brain. That actually is already going to be helpful because a lot of us like kind of are carrying around our to-do list in our head or like on 87 little, tiny scraps of paper.
So even getting it all written down in one place is going to help. And categorizing it is going to be useful too. Probably just categorizing it there's going to be stuff that you're like, “I'm not going to fucking do that. I don't need to do that. It doesn't need to get done by me.”
But then beyond that like a lot of my clients are busy, important, smart people with like, very fancy jobs. So there might be 10 important things that need to get done and they might have room for five. So in that case, even if there are 10 things that are important, you still have like a limited amount of slots to fill.
So I like to start with, like if I could only do three things, which things would I choose? Which things matter the most, and in what order? Because if you have like 10 or 37 things in your little squares, that's kind of a lot of data for the brain to process. When we limit it to three that's really going to constrain things for our brain, it's going to help our brain focus in.
And if you have room for more than three, you can just do three, and then you can do three more up until how many spaces you have. But if you're like, “Oh, what are the top 12 things?” That's going to be a more challenging analysis for your brain to perform. So start with three or even start with one. If I could only do one thing on here, what matters more than everything else?
Like I'm a coach, I have a coaching business. I work with my clients on calls, and I work with my clients in the Slack. If I could only do one thing because like I had some interruption to my day or whatever or like if I had to like constrain my day down to one thing that matters most, it’s my coaching calls. The thing that matters the most after that is the coaching Slack. Right?
I love y'all and I love recording the podcast. But I would put that after, it would still be important even when it's not urgent, but I would put it after the coaching calls with my own clients. So that's an example of how to do that.
And then let's just take a minute to talk about the calendar. Now there are like lots of different ways you can do this. And a lot of coaches have methodologies that they teach, I have a methodology and it's much more simple than a lot of people's.
So, I just pick the things that are important that I'm going to do. And then I just put them on the calendar in the slots I have available. Right? So I don't sort them into projects. I don't like organize them and I don't calendar my full day out. Like I don't like write the full to-do list, put every single thing onto the calendar and then throw it away.
I write the list, I pull it out of my head, and then I decide like what are the most important things and then I put those on there. And then if there's time leftover, then I put increasingly less important things.
But a note, like don't cram your calendar to busting, right? A lot of people do that too. And then at the end of the day they're completely exhausted because they're not giving themselves time to like be a human being in a human body that needs to like drink water and go to the bathroom and do stuff.
So when you're doing your calendar, if you're doing that, I think it's really useful to also calendar in breaks. Actually, a lot of coaches, and I think this is a really good idea, suggest for you to calendar in your breaks and your pleasure and your free time first. And that way if you are letting your work run over you can see really clearly what you're losing when you do that.
Like I said, I kind of have a much more simple method than a lot of people. So I just tend to think in like, here's 45 minutes of work. And then I give myself 15 minutes to like do whatever whether it's like get up and go to the bathroom. Or like make a cup of, I'm not actually drinking coffee right now because my body has been rejecting it, but like make a cup of tea or something like that.
And I also calendar and like a walk during my day and I calendar in my lunch. Because if I don't do that, then I'll forget to eat and then I'll be starving, hungry on a coaching call and nobody wants to get coached by a hangry coach. That's like not a super fun thing to have happen.
Okay, so to recap, when you're thinking about how to prioritize your tasks, I highly suggest that you use the Stephen Covey tool that I talked about. Where you ask yourself about whether the tasks are urgent or important and put them into one of those four categories.
And then from there you think about if I can only do three things, which would I do if I could only do three things? Which would I do and in what order? And then you use that information to stick the things on your actual calendar.
Now, I know a lot of y'all have a lot of meetings, I've worked in corporate, I used to also have a lot of meetings. And actually, I still have a lot of meetings because that's what my coaching calls are. Technically I'm having Zoom meetings all day with lovely humans, helping them figure out how to create more meaning and satisfaction in their work lives, right?
But what I see is that people will have like six hours of meetings, and they'll still want to get like eight hours of knowledge work done. That's not going to work. That is not how math works.
If you have six hours of meetings, then you have two hours left where you can schedule other things if you're in an eight hour workday. If that's not going to be enough time then you get to ask yourself like, “Do I need to cancel some of these meetings? Do I need to reset expectations about what I can get done?”
I'm seeing all the time people trying to do basically like 16 hours of work in eight hours of time. And like I was saying before, coaching tools can definitely make you more effective, they can help you streamline, and they can help reduce how much time it takes to do specific tasks. But before you can do that, you need to be honest with yourself about your current capacity, right?
It's kind of like lifting weights, you have to be honest with yourself about how much weights you can lift. Because if you try to lift weights that you can't lift, that's not going to make you stronger, you're just not going to be able to pick it up. Or you're going to injure yourself, right?
So before you can get more effective at how long it takes you to do a task, you have to get more effective at choosing your tasks, and calendaring those tasks, and then doing them during the time that's calendared.
And, like I also mentioned, you can put your meetings also on your calendar through the urgent versus important framework and then decide if you want to keep the meetings or not. Like you might discover that 30% of your meetings are neither urgent nor important. And then you might be like I'm not going to go to these anymore.
And if you've discovered they're neither urgent or important, and you know which of your tasks are urgent and important, or are important but not urgent, it becomes a lot easier to have a conversation with other people about the way you're going to choose to spend your time.
Like it's one thing to just cancel a meeting and be like, “I don't want to go anymore.” I mean, you're certainly allowed to do that. If you remember the podcast on like making requests, I don't think it's like the most useful way to communicate at work.
Versus if you're like, “Hey manager person, like I did some analysis and I found that I've been spending this much time in these meetings, and they are neither urgent nor important. And instead, I would like to be doing these tasks and these tasks and these things. And this is what I think the appropriate prioritization is.”
Like you're taking ownership of making sure you're getting your important work done, and you're communicating that up, and you're showing that you've thought it through and you're trying to use the company's resource, which is you, in the way that's going to give the company the most benefit. And it's also going to allow you to do a really good job without trying to expect yourself to be able to be in meetings six hours a day and also get eight hours of work done. The math is just not gonna work, y’all.
And it doesn't need to, like you don't need to do that to like, provide a lot of value at your company and to get important work done at a high level. I actually think you're going to get so much more important work done and done really well when you prioritize your work and use your calendar to create space to do that work without trying to cram it all in there and stressing yourself out in the process.
All right, that was like kind of a lot, I think. So if you have more questions about prioritization and how to use the calendar, write in and tell me about it, because I can always do a follow up if you want more information.
And if you love what I teach, and you want some help taking things a little bit deeper and figuring out how this all applies to your own life, I've got good news for you. I've got space for a few new one on one coaching clients starting this month. So let's hop on a call. I'll give you some coaching right away to help you get going. And if it seems like a good fit, I will share with you how we can work together. Just head on over to my website and click on the work with me button and get started there.
Also, bonus, my coaching offering is totally virtual so as to better serve my global audience. And yes, I do work with people who are not native English speakers and we've had great success doing that. There's even a testimonial on my website with someone in that category so you can check that out on the testimonials page. All right y'all, have a lovely week and I will talk to you next time. Bye.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
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