One of the joys of being a Productivity Ninja is that we are genuinely here to help. We go into organisations, see what they are doing wrong in the whole area of “What do I do next?” and then introduce them to some simple ideas that help answer that question.
One of the simplest ideas is “Big Rocks”. Without dwelling on the metaphor, it simply invites people to identify those things that will have the biggest impact for them, their teams and their organisations, and focus on these things. They need to ignore the rest.
Why is this relevant? Because in today’s immediacy-hungry world, the natural temptation is to address whatever is top of the pile. And it’s nearly always email. Email has become the default location for our attention. This is fine, of course. Except that nothing important ever happens in email.
Last week, I was running a workshop for a large PLC. It was a workshop on general Productivity, but the attendees kept on dragging the conversation back to “How can we respond to emails more quickly?” I explained that the work only happens when you disconnect from email. We all have to choose - either be really good at email, or achieve some impact. You can’t do both.
Being good at email is the worst career strategy, because sooner or later someone in your organisation will realise that there is someone in India who is better at email than you are. And a tenth of the cost.
So, today’s challenge: create some impact by being bad at email.