Make Time for the Work That Matters

More hours in the day. It's one thing everyone wants, and yet it's impossible to attain. But what if you could free up significant time--maybe as much as 20% of your workday--to focus on the responsibilities that really matter? The authors have spent the past three years studying the productivity of knowledge workers and discovered that they spend, on average, 41% of their time on activities that offer little personal satisfaction and could be handled competently by others. On the basis of their research, the authors have come up with a process to help knowledge workers make themselves more productive. It involves thinking consciously about how they spend their time, deciding which tasks matter most to them and their organizations, and dropping or creatively outsourcing the rest. The tasks to be dropped are sorted into quick kills (things you can stop doing now, without any negative effects), off-load opportunities (work that can be delegated with minimal effort), and long-term redesign (work that needs to be reconceived or restructured). Once the tasks are disposed of, the freed-up time is spent focusing on more-important work. When 15 executives tried this, they were able to reduce desk work by an average of six hours per week and meetings by two hours per week. They filled the time with value-added tasks like coaching and strategizing.

• Delegating
• Economics
• Personal productivity