Everyone has their own system for getting things done. However, some people are more effective than others! Your system is designed to get you the exact results you are currently getting. Maybe its time to try something else. Check out this great blog by author Donald Miller on his system for getting things done:
Here’s the system Donald Miller uses, in his own words:
I’m not a CEO type, but I run a little company. I’m not efficient, but I get things done. I’m an artist living in the world of people who dot every “i” and cross every “t” and take pride in their ability to get things done.
I’ve read a few books on becoming more efficient, but they all read like Greek to me. I’m not a linear thinker. I’m not going to create an elaborate filing system.
All I want to do in my professional life is get important things done. It would be easy for me to get bogged down.
So as a creative, how do I manage?
Turns out I have a system. It’s a patch I learned a long time ago.
I do this: I focus on one ball and I hit it.
What I mean is, on a given day I’m asked to coffee twice, asked to review and endorse at least one manuscript, receive more than one-hundred emails and about twenty text messages. That’s per day. Per week, add in a few invitations to speak, a few friends coming to town, requests to talk on the phone and so on. I’d say I get between 500 to 1000 requests per week that claim to need a response.
I see each of these requests as a baseball coming at me from the pitchers mound.
And I decide NOT TO HIT THEM.
That’s right. I do the incredibly rude and offensive thing. I let them pass by.
Right now I have thousands of unreturned emails and hundreds of unopened text messages. It’s rude. It’s insanely rude. It’s not nice. In a culture that takes pride in people who get their inboxes to zero, I’m a complete loser.
And yet, year after year I get an enormous amount of work done.
The thing is, I see all those baseballs coming at me from the pitchers mound and instead of trying to hit them all, I choose one and I swing for a home run. Of the dozens of pitches thrown at me on a given day, I focus on one and I hit it. When I’m done, I pull the bat back and hit another.
After I hit a few pitches a day (a daily quota) I try to respond to some of the others, but I don’t worry about it if I can’t get to them all.
Here are the steps in my “two step process” to getting things done, broken down:
1. Pick your pitch:
- This means knowing, as opportunities are coming at you, which one you should hit. I hit the ones that have to do with furthering my calling as a writer. That means I write the blog, work on the new book, interview that guy who’s been elusive and so on. That’s the ball I want to hit consistently. The others are extra. If I have time, I have time, if not, it doesn’t matter cause that’s not my pitch.
2. Let the others go by:
This is incredibly hard for some people to do. They feel like they are morally obligated to respond to everything. And maybe we are. Maybe in heaven Jesus will be mad because we didn’t return our emails. But I doubt it. I have nearly 200 unreturned text messages and several thousand unreturned emails. I take no pride in getting to zero because I’m not on the planet to get my inbox to zero. I’m on the planet for other reasons. I explain to people I can’t respond to all the requests and I go back to step one. I pick my pitch and try to hit it out of the park.
Will this system frustrate people? Yes, it will. And I don’t like that, but that’s not the point, the point is I have to hit my pitch. Is this the best system? No, it’s not. But it’s the system that works for me. If I had a more linear mind, I’d have a different system.
Anyway, I miss a lot of balls, but I hit a lot of home runs too. I hope for some of you creative types this is helpful.
– See more at: http://storylineblog.com/2013/06/10/how-i-manage-too-many-tasks/#sthash.xOIBQuOz.dpuf
ERIK LINDEEN 