I'm guessing the answer is "What is that?"
You only have 24 hours in a day. Whether you are aware of it, your commitments are accumulating over time. Being non-strategic in your commitments, you end up repeating tasks that are wrecking your day’s productivity. They increasingly chip away at your focus on the tasks that are aimed at achieving YOUR personal goals. Non-strategic tasks not only rob you of productive time, but also mental focus and energy. Even seemingly small tasks can (and will) rob you of time, attention, and energy.
Many of my inspirations for pursuit of leadership focus on the importance of recognizing the importance of saying no to tasks that are not productive for you. In James Clear’s article, The Ultimate Productivity Hack Is Saying No, he describes how easy it is to get sucked into meetings, favors, habits that do nothing to forward our own agenda. Like others on leadership, he acknowledges the benefit of accepting opportunities early in our career, as skill development. But overall, we need to say no to distractions, tasks that lead us away from our ultimate goal. I encourage you to read this brief article, which illustrates the need to and how to say “no” more often. He quotes Peter Drucker: “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all”.
In a following blog, I’ll share ideas on how to go about really looking at how your time is spent, what is helpful and what could simply rob time, how to create the not-to-do-list and adhere to it.
NOTE: If the hyperlink in Clear's article title does no work, the URL is: https://jamesclear.com/saying-no