The beauty of the process I have described is that by going through the daily review process, you start to build the foundation for a behavior change. As described earlier, the To Don’t List is a fearless inventory of all the items you want to eliminate from your day. If you make activity identification a key part of your daily process then you are well on your way to making some Time Management breakthroughs.
As you identify items that are candidates for elimination, you should log them immediately on your To Don’t List. To be effective this list should contain the following information:
· The short name of the activity to be eliminated · A longer description [ideally limited to 144 characters] · The number of hours you spend on that activity each year · The category the item belongs in
It is best to create this list in Excel, and then you can total up the number of hours that you have identified as candidates for elimination. If you copy this total to the top of the list, it will give you an up-to-date sense of the potential amount of time you could gain.
Many people find this motivational, and it becomes even more so if you add in the value of your time. If you multiply the number of hours that you have logged on the To Don’t List by the value of your time then you will come up with the value of the hours you could gain by eliminating items that are on the list.
I call this the Total Opportunity Value, and it can be a substantial number. Most of the To Don’t Lists that I see have at least 200 hours a year of time that could be eliminated. If the value of your time is $350 an hour then your total opportunity value is $70,000. Assuming that you are only able to figure out how to eliminate 70% of the items on your To Don’t List you would be generating additional time that could be worth $50,000 to you.
The methodology for collecting the activity elimination data is very straightforward, though it does require daily activity. This is a behavior change that may require an accountability structure, and you can accomplish that through consulting or peer pressure in the workshop environment. Once the data is collected, the steps need to eliminate the inappropriate activities are relatively simple, and execution has every chance of happening.
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