You know too well that hopeless, overwhelmed feeling that comes from looking at your to-do list. It’s a sense of constant backsliding: For every item you check off, you add three more.
It’s the way of the world now to have much more to do at any given moment than available time to do it. Simply working longer hours or staying up later won’t help you catch up. The current climate, in which everything you’re working on was needed yesterday, calls for a better approach to task management, prioritization and, ultimately, productivity.
That approach is based on getting comfortable with dropping balls that aren’t critical to your main goals. Turning a blind eye to distractions and shiny objects. Letting it go if it doesn’t move you closer to your key objectives. In other words, learning to ignore things.
But that advice can be easier said than done, especially when working for a boss or with clients. How do you know what — or who — you can effectively mute while shifting your focus to higher priority projects and people?
Here are a few suggestions on how to stop procrastinating and shed or delay what you don’t have time to complete by losing the guilt and using diplomacy as needed.
Put on your blinders to the inessential.
When you have a time-sensitive project, you need to channel your focus toward getting it done by the deadline. Yet if you tend to procrastinate, situations requiring urgency may tempt you to work on anything else instead.
When this happens, you need a new strategy: homing in only on what you really need to get done right now. Dismiss your urge to make a phone call about that overdue personal appointment or organize the piles of papers on your desk. Decline that invitation to join co-workers headed to your favorite lunch spot. Remind yourself that there will be time after you’ve reached your goal to do these other things. Right now, you need to ignore them.
Recognize your weak spots when it comes to distractions.
Rather than vowing to ignore all common time sucks like social media, personal texts or your inbox, it’s more effective to identify what really pulls you off track in particular. If you’re always tempted to talk to your colleagues every time you return from a meeting — losing a half-hour of time that could be devoted to critical projects — then flag “small talk” as something to start ignoring during the workday.
This need not be painful. By having a direct talk with your co-worker in advance about needing to focus on your projects during the day, you can avoid hurt feelings and reschedule casual chat for times when it won’t conflict with getting your work done, like during actual breaks, lunchtime or after work.
[See: How to Call in Sick.]
Learn to triage.
When medical teams are short-staffed, they use the fine art of triage to prioritize patients who have the greatest health care needs. Executive coach Ed Batista recommends using a triage strategy in other situations as well.
“Triage for the rest of us entails not just focusing on the items that are most important and deferring those that are less important until ‘later,’ but actively ignoring the vast number of items whose importance falls below a certain threshold,” he writes in a Harvard Business Review article.
Batista suggests learning to reframe how you think about this issue to avoid negative feelings of failure. Instead of perceiving the tasks you’ve ignored or people you’ve disappointed as problems, view them as signs of success.
“[U]ltimate victory lies not in winning tactical battles but winning the war: Not an empty inbox, but an inbox emptied of all truly important messages,” he explains.
[See: How to Cover Corporate Travel Expenses When You’re Broke.]
Don’t get caught up in people-pleasing.
Yes, you need to put your supervisor’s and often your clients’ needs first, if you want to keep your job or their business. But there’s a difference between doing things because they’re essential to the success of your career and doing them just to avoid disappointing others. If you need to bump someone’s request down or off of your list, you may get some pushback. But don’t let that stop you from focusing on what’s most important to your endgame.
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Master the Art of Ignoring to Get More Done at Work originally appeared on usnews.com
