Everyday – Three Choices
Every morning when I get into my office, I have a choice between three options:
- I can dive directly into my email inbox and get lost in others’ priorities.
- I can work on what I traditionally call my 3 ‘M.I.T.s’ – my ‘most important tasks’.
- I can carve out the initial time for my ‘M.I.P.s’ – my ‘most important practices’.
The easiest but least productive option is option 1. It’s so easy to pop open email and start firing off responses and answering questions and barking orders.
I’ve been training myself to select option 2: M.I.T.s – Most Important Tasks. I forget where I first heard this little acronym, but it’s a powerful habit. When you have a thousand different items on your to-do list, take out a blank sheet of paper and write down three items that are the most important items on that to-do list.
In truth, it hardly matters if these three tasks are the most important. Having three clear items on a big white piece of paper will help you get traction.
That’s a great practice, but I’ve had an epiphany.
Most Important Practices
While email urgency falls firmly into the ‘urgent, not important’ category (check out Stephen Covey’s time management quadrant), Most Important Tasks also smack of urgency.
Of course, as the name implies, they aren’t just urgent, but also important.
The problem is that they put you in the ‘urgent’ mode, and those vitally important yet not urgent practices get squeezed out.
Most sales, marketing, or leadership roles require some kind of thought work. Writing, planning, developing key relationships, and establishing goals and direction are all necessary for long term growth.
Those activities can only be supported by having a set of practices that keep them in the forefront.
When those practices are relegated to the end of the work day when all the urgencies are done, those practices never actually happen.
But when those practices are tackled with discipline during the first part of the day, the urgencies all seem to get taken care of as they would any other day. We lose nothing by prioritizing the ‘important, not urgent’ practices first.
M.I.P.s vs. M.I.T.s
I believe we owe it to ourselves and our overall work to spend time on the Most Important Practices first. Writing, making sales calls, and developing thought leadership projects have to happen when our brains are best equipped for them and before our days get obliterated by urgencies.
We can then move on to the Most Important Tasks with some email tossed in.
What Do You Do First?
What works for you?
How do you start your day so that you are your most productive?
I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments…
Great reminder! I USED to be very disciplined with doing the important but not urgent. I would get out of bed about and hour and a half before anyone else, and just take care of those things first; or at least plan my day around implementing things that would help me get these things started/done. But, as my life has filled up more with the urgent, I find myself saying that once I can get all of those things done, my mind will be free to focus on the important. Like you said, that either never happens or I’m mentally spent. I need to make this more…important! Thanks.
Exactly! I just know that I never regret 30 minutes at the beginning of the day doing the important, not urgent.
Hi Brett. Up until recently – last week – I went straight to my emails first but since I started the blogging challenge my first task every morning is to check what the challenge for the day is. I may not be able to work on it immediately (because I have a day job) but because I’m aware of it, it ferments and I find it much easier to write when I get home.
At the moment I feel the challenge is my M.I.P. whereas all my M.I.Ts are work related. I can live with that.
As today’s challenge is about guest posting, would you be interested in swapping posts? I’m searching out bloggers who have a similar outlook to me so that I can provide something of value.
I’d love to hear from you.
Hi Norah! Sure… we can discuss and see what might make sense.
And I agree – the Challenge is an MIP. It makes sense to tackle one MIP (at least) a day and not stress too much about only tackling the one, even if only for 15 minutes.