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How to Find Time for Your Most Important Practices

Like everybody else, I struggle with the tyranny of the urgent.

That’s why one of my biggest aims is to carve out time to attack the practices, disciplines, and tasks that will nearly never be urgent until it’s absolutely too late.

This includes adopting daily disciplines and giving priority during the day to Most Important Practices (MIPs).

But given the fact that most of us struggle with a nasty combination of overcommitment and procrastination, we have difficulty protecting dedicated time to engage our most important practices. We overcommit and then piddle until our only option is to tend to urgencies.

I go through seasons where I’m extremely disciplined about my practices like morning exercise, writing, prospecting for clients. And then I go through seasons where I feel a bit like a pinball bouncing from bumper to bumper.

When I’m doing well at creating time for my most important practices, here’s why:

Start Small: I set a timer for 25 minutes and pick one practice. I commit to the 25 minutes, and then I let myself do all the urgent stuff.
Do It First Thing in the Morning: I try to get one personal MIP done first thing after I wake up. When I get to work, I try to do one MIP first thing, before I open email – again only 25 minutes.
Plan Early: Some days, the mornings just don’t work. If not, I’ll plan early and identify 25 minutes some time during the day where I can pull back. During lunch, prior to my commute home, as soon as the kids go to bed (in agreement with my wife). I set aside some moment to touch on at least one MIP.
Be Flexible: Have enough grace with yourself to only do 10 minutes of a practice if that’s all you have. Just make sure to do something.

Out of all these, my main suggestion is to have one clear practice in mind before the day starts and a set, short period of time set aside to do the practice.

It works. And any traction on these important, not urgent activities is good traction.

My challenge today: Get two practices in. I was able to write and get exercise. Yay me!

What works for you?

Listening and Reading for Today

How To Be Effective At Social Marketing Without Content Curation – Web Search Social Podcast with Carol Lynn Rivera

Rivera makes a case against the 80-20 rule as many social media marketers have applied it to social media posts. Why do we have to spend so much time blasting everyone else’s stories but our own? Give the podcast a listen. Great stuff (and short – I’m starting to like short form podcasts).

Sales Hack: Salespeople help, salespeople – Sales Gravy Podcast with Jeb Blount

Blount offers up a great little hack. If you’re having a hard time getting through a gatekeeper, call back and ask for a member of the sales team. They can often help you navigate through the organization to your key contact.

DO WHAT YOU KNOW – North Point Community Church with Clay Scroggins

Scroggins’ sermon is all about the difference between knowing what to do and doing what you know. The challenge was simply this: choose one thing that you know you should do and do it. The sermon was a part of the series ‘Anything But Average‘. The previous sermons in the series were about learning to (a) Exceed Expectations and (b) Delay Gratification. Great little series.

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…

How to Find Time for Your Most Important Practices