Surfacing Low Priority Tasks and Dealing with Over Commitment

ivanjay205

Registered
Hi Everyone, I am a long time GTDer and I have a pretty good handle on the system. I use Omnifocus as my tool of preference. I am great at capturing, clear my inbox every day and diligently complete my weekly review every Friday.

My struggle is I am a President/Owner of a small business that is not tiny. We have 40 employees and do work all over the US. I travel quite a bit, have a ton of meetings, but also have a lot of direct actionable responsibilities in terms of tasks myself. We arent that big where I have a team to delegate everything too.

So I find two major issues…. Looking for help with them…

1. The overwhelm… when I am busy even with a sense of everything has its place I know the list is bigger than my time. I know the GTD answer is to delegate but that is not always an option. How do you manage or subdivide based on priority or somehow prevent that driving feeling of overcommittment?

2. How do you surface on a regular basis lower priority tasks? I find I spend 90 percent of my professional time on my client and my people (employees) area of focus in my system. Those take a lot of my time and are very important to me. But I still need to get to the other items at times.

I feel like I need a subset of my system…. Almost to carve out on a smaller basis my priorities. Maybe seeing the entire picture as I clearly do with GTD is not a good thing?
 

René Lie

Certified GTD Trainer
Seeing the entire picture IS a good thing in my opinion! But do you really? I'm not insinuating anything, but make sure that you have captured everything!

I often find myself working out of my inbox when things get busy... So I try to stop and Clarify and Organize so I can see all my options in one place (lists of next actions).

Also, keep in mind the three-fold nature of work:

* Doing planned work
* Doing unplanned work
* Define your work

It's tough sometimes, but it's important to keep a healthy balance between the three...
 

mcogilvie

Registered
I think GTD actually demands a lot of maturity and honesty from people. If you are committed to doing something, it’s like Yoda says: “There is no try, only do or not do.” Suppose you had a list of things to do, with priorities 1 to 5. You find yourself consistently doing only priorities 1 and 2, so you decide you need a better process for handling priorities 3-5. What could that possibly look like? When my wife and I were new parents, we received some advice: “first things first, second things if you can, and third things probably not at all,” But you have to decide what you are going to do, and what to let go.
 

dtj

Registered
Nearly every garbage day, I go through refrigerator and throw out not longer viable vegetables and expired healthy food. I look on the shelves near by workbench, and in the garage, and see all the dust-covered components of awesome useful projects.

Apparently aspiration, inspiration, and intent isn't enough.
 
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bishblaize

Registered
I run a company about the same size, so I feel your pain! I think there are two things to say here.

Firstly, no matter how good your GTD set-up is, it can't overcome a fundamental issue of low capacity. If your senior team is made up of 4 people and you're doing the work of 8, that's a strategic problem, not an operational one. This is a classic catch-22 that small businesses face as they grow - they lack the capacity to generate more revenue but lack the revenue to build more capacity. How to overcome that is different for each business, but identifying it as a real strategic need is the first step.

Going back to GTD, what helps a lot for me is an extended processing time in the morning. I start at seven and get a clear hour and a half or so before I need to do anything else. So for me, my 2-minute rule has stretched to more like a 5- or even 10-minute. Rather than it being "everything goes into my action lists, unless it's small" it's more like "nothing goes into my action lists unless it's big".

In reality, of course, it's not always that easy, and sometimes I don't get that time, and I just have to process quickly, such as if I'm not at home or if the kids are off school etc. But as a rule of thumb, it's worked for me for two reasons.

One, my next action lists used to have this really long tail of small items that I'd never get around to because, in isolation, they appeared unimportant, even though I had to get them done eventually. My weekly reviews used to end up being very bitty, with lots of little bits and pieces to get through. Now I get to start focussing more on the Projects level and above, and whether they're the right projects in the first place, rather than just rattling through them trying to get a next action for each one.

The other issue is that, when you run a business, you have such a wide range of things to think about that it can take a lot of mental horsepower to switch between topics. It's not easy to switch from finance, to comms, to business development, to legal, to premises etc., one after the other. If something's in my inbox and it's fresh in my mind, it's much easier from a mental perspective to do it there and then.

If I agree to, say, do something for our new website in a meeting today, then I don't even think about comms or IT for two weeks, it's tough to dredge up everything to do with the website all that time later.

I wouldn't say this would suit everyone, but its worked great for me.
 

Jared Caron

Nursing leader; GTD enthusiast
Hi Everyone, I am a long time GTDer and I have a pretty good handle on the system. I use Omnifocus as my tool of preference. I am great at capturing, clear my inbox every day and diligently complete my weekly review every Friday.

My struggle is I am a President/Owner of a small business that is not tiny. We have 40 employees and do work all over the US. I travel quite a bit, have a ton of meetings, but also have a lot of direct actionable responsibilities in terms of tasks myself. We arent that big where I have a team to delegate everything too.

So I find two major issues…. Looking for help with them…

1. The overwhelm… when I am busy even with a sense of everything has its place I know the list is bigger than my time. I know the GTD answer is to delegate but that is not always an option. How do you manage or subdivide based on priority or somehow prevent that driving feeling of overcommittment?

2. How do you surface on a regular basis lower priority tasks? I find I spend 90 percent of my professional time on my client and my people (employees) area of focus in my system. Those take a lot of my time and are very important to me. But I still need to get to the other items at times.

I feel like I need a subset of my system…. Almost to carve out on a smaller basis my priorities. Maybe seeing the entire picture as I clearly do with GTD is not a good thing?
Sounds like you might be referring to administrative tasks here. Not high priority but need to be done and often have some time sensitivity to them.

I find checklists and the threefold nature of work are the key concepts here. As an overly simple example I have to create a schedule for staff every month and also do some administrative oversight of their work. I put this stuff in a checklist that reoccurs on my calendar every month. The subject line also indicates “2-3 hours” reminding me I need to actually schedule 2-3 hours to complete this work in order for it to get done.

Just a thought, hope it helps
 

ivanjay205

Registered
Thanks everyone, I do appreciate all of the great concepts! The good news is the holidays came around the right time. A lot of people like to take off. I love working this time of year as it gives me a great opportunity to get down into those lower priority areas. As a result just a few things have surfaced as ideas for me:

  1. Just accept it. This is reality and as was mentioned above the system is doing what it is intended to do. Park everything so it is not forgotten but let the critical stuff get done and everything else when I get to.
  2. I have stretched my morning focus time a bit. Right now this is easy because we are in quieter holiday period. When we get to January and full speed again this will take some discipline to hold on to that time for me. I hate appearing unavailable but I am going to try to close my office door and avoid distractions during this time. The pop-ins from my team are a real problem in these windows.
  3. I am not going to do it yet but I am thinking about taking either one friday a month or a quarter to block out a Friday for a P3 day (priority 3 or the low priority things) and just allow that to be for that purpose.

I also saw the comment from a fellow business owner about the challenge of scaling up the resources to grow the revenue but having the revenue to do so. This is a real challenge. The good news is we have some things happening on the business were we are on the cusp of building significant additional revenue potential through some growth on our team of individuals and their promotions to new roles. That should help open up some of those doors. That being said I think understanding the priority mix is okay and for now that might be how it goes. But one thing I did decide to do is ease back the restrictions on spend for outsource. We develop a ERP app for our business via quick base. I am a computer savvy person and knew it would help my business tremendously so I took all of the heavy lifting on developing it. Occasionally there is a 3rd party company we pay to develop certain features based on time required and complexity. I take a lot of it on myself just because I can do it for free vs pay them. Mentally I am building my own value in cost and trying to be better about delegating to them a bit to take some pressure off of me.

We'll see how this goes!
 
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