Collaboration Chronicles

This post comes from a comment I made over at erica.biz.

Eliminating tasks that don’t need to be done is the hardest thing for me.

Couple of ways to do this:

1. Overcommit yourself. What doesn’t need to get done won’t get done. The key to this is to NOT go into crisis management mode… easier said than done, but it’s a main technique of mine, and my life is fairly low stress (albeit busy as ‘ell).

2. For any particular task, ask yourself WHY it needs to done. If there isn’t a bottom line return (or CYA if necessary), then it can get pushed back in the stack. This is much harder for me to do than overcommitting… partly due to rewiring myself from a pure research mode where serendipity is often found in “low value” activities.

I suspect that as I become more successful, I’ll go full circle. In not-very-humble opinion, most of current crop of high powered CEOs could do with another tour through the corporate mail room once or twice a year. I look forward to that myself.

How to do you eliminate what doesn’t need to be done?

This entry was posted on Monday, July 14th, 2008 at 7:32 pm and is filed under Vision. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.