One of the key components of being productive is focusing on what matters most.  How do we minimize less important things and focus on things that are central to long and short term goals? In an ideal world, we’d be able to focus one hundred percent of our time on what matters most, and delegate the supporting tasks to someone else.

Because we don’t live in an ideal world, most of us must spend way more time than we want to on the minutia that supports our best work – administrative tasks, phone calls and email, meetings, contact management, logging items of importance and answering questions from others about the nature of our work. There are few, if any, of us who have support staff sufficient to delegate all of these responsibilities.

But we can minimize the impact of these obligations on our work.

When working with clients, I try to craft a productivity strategy that enables clients to spend 60-80% of their time on what matters most – what they are trained to do and what they do best. The other 20-40% percent of time can be used to complete supporting tasks. This is the ideal scenario.

In less ideal scenarios, clients may find that they need to spend 60-80% of their time on administrative and support tasks. The best way to be productive, though, is to minimize support tasks in favor of doing your most important work whenever possible.

Visualize two concentric circles – the inner circle is our most important work; where we want to focus our time and energy. The outer, surrounding circle are all the things we need to do (or have someone else do) to support that inner circle.

Figuring out how to spend as much time as possible in the inner circle leads to better productivity and support of long and short term goals.

Next month we will discuss strategies that enable focus on the inner circle.

Lisa Mark, C.P.O. is a productivity expert and Certified Professional Organizer. Contact Lisa if you would like to find out how she can formulate a plan to increase efficiency in your business.