After our recent move to a different state, tasks appeared on my task manager, Things, that no longer needed to be done. There was no need to clean a birth bath that we no longer owned, and the trash and recycling days were different in South Dakota than in Arizona.
This experience got me thinking about how many other tasks I might have in my task manager, calendar, or project list that didn’t need to be done.
In an article in 1963 in the Harvard Business Review, Peter Drucker wrote, “There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.”
We need to periodically review our “things to do” lists and remove items that don’t need to be done. Otherwise, we’re wasting our time on useless tasks.
What Kind of Tasks Can We Kill?
There are many tasks that we can eliminate:
• A function you inherited that has no value. A new job can come with a set of tasks. When the answer to the question, “Why do we do this?” is “No one knows,” perhaps it’s time to kill the task.
You’ve probably heard how a housewife always cuts off the ends of a pot roast. When asked why she did so, she responded, “Because my mother always did so.” When the mother was asked why, she explained that her pot was too small to contain a roast, so she had to cut off the ends for it to fit. The reason for the task no longer existed.
• A life role or function in a role that is no longer important to you. Occasionally, we find that we’re involved in a life role or a function within a life role that we no longer want to do or has no purpose.
Maybe we were genuinely interested in photography as a hobby, but our interests have moved to other areas. Is it beneficial to continue to serve on the board of a local photography club or edit a newsletter? Perhaps it’s time to resign from a responsibility you once had an interest in but no longer do.
• A task you hate doing. If you have a job you hate doing, can you delegate it? Do you hate editing audio? Someone else you work with may love doing so, or you can outsource the editing for a reasonable cost.
Occasionally, we have to do tasks we hate doing and get through them, but often, with some creative thinking, we can find a way to delegate or outsource them. This frees up more time for you to focus on doing the important things to you.
The Benefits of Killing Unnecessary Tasks
Killing tasks that don’t need to be done has many benefits:
• It helps you to focus on more important things. Todd Henry, author of Daily Creative, wrote, “Closing a door by saying no allows you to channel your finite energy into the places where it can matter. Do not commit out of guilt, shame, or obligation unless you plan to give it your full effort.”
Instead of saying no to tasks as a negative, see it as a positive. By killing unnecessary tasks, you make room for yourself to take on new jobs that matter to you. You open the doors to new opportunities.
• It clears the decks of productivity clutter. David Allen, productivity expert and author of the best-selling Getting Things Done, wrote a foundational principle of productivity: “Your mind is for having ideas, not for holding them.” He recommended that you write down every task you have in your mind to get it out of your mind and onto paper or digital format.
It’s excellent advice and the foundation of every task manager and note-taking system. However, it can result in “to-do” lists containing thousands of items that will never get done. This task clutter, in turn, causes stress and a sense of hopelessness when a person realizes they will never be done.
Reducing the number of tasks by including only those truly important minimizes the clutter in your systems and makes you more efficient and less stressed.
• It replaces busyness with true productivity. Productivity is not about being busy all the time. “Productivity Isn’t About Doing More Things — It’s About Doing the Right Things.” Chris Bailey, The Productivity Project.
If you have too many unnecessary tasks, you’ll be busy but won’t be productive.
The key to productivity is to identify and work on the tasks that are the right things for you to do — those things that are important to you. To focus on the right things, you’ll need to eliminate the things that aren’t important.
“It’s easy to get bogged down in doing things faster, better, and more efficiently. However, it’s all for nothing if the thing we’re trying to accomplish isn’t going to provide any real benefit in the long run.” Eric Ravenscraft, Nothing is Less Productive Than Doing What Should Not Be Done at All.
How to Eliminate Unnecessary and Unimportant Tasks
1. Periodically review your task manager and calendar for current and upcoming tasks and events.
Every week on Sunday, I perform a weekly review. As a part of that review, I look at my calendar for the coming week and my upcoming tasks in my task manager.
When I review my calendar and task manager, I scan not only to see what I have coming up in the next week that I need to get done but also what I don’t need to get done.
If I identify an unnecessary task, event, or project, I kill it immediately. If it’s a repeating task that is no longer needed, I make sure the repetitions are also killed so the same task doesn’t appear in the future.
For more information about my weekly review process, including the template I use, see my blog post, The Power of Quarterly and Weekly Reviews. As my post explains, I’m heavily indebted to David Sparks for my review process.
2. Periodically review your active projects and projects on hold to see if they’re still important.
If you haven’t worked on an active project for weeks, why? Perhaps it’s not important enough to work on. If so, you might consider moving it to the “projects on hold” or the “closed projects” folder.
Occasionally, we get an idea for a project and think it’s worth pursuing, but over time, we realize it’s not that great of an idea or that it isn’t significant enough to follow. In that case, get it off the list of your current projects.
3. Do a Quarterly Review to dive deep into your roles and projects and ask if they are worth doing.
My system’s weekly reviews are more limited and skim the surface. I remind myself of the essential roles and ask how I’m doing with each. In addition, I review the tasks, events, and projects I have coming up for the week.
My quarterly reviews are much more comprehensive. I do an in-depth review of my roles and ideal behaviors for each role and ask, “What should I stop doing?” and “What should I put on hold?” This helps me to identify items that need to be cut.
After reviewing my overall roles and habits, I ask two other important questions:
• Am I doing too much?
• What here should I throw overboard?
These questions are invaluable in that they prompt me to think about the current status of my workload and what I should get rid of. Even if you decide everything you do is essential, do you have time to do it all?
In productivity, there is a “point of diminishing returns.” We as humans can’t work all the time — to do our best work, we need time to relax, recreate, and rest. If we push ourselves too hard, we reduce our overall productivity, not increase it.
Clear the Decks of Unnecessary Tasks
It’s clear that to maximize your productivity, you need to kill unnecessary tasks.
I urge you to implement a weekly and quarterly review system that prompts you to review your tasks, events, and projects and eliminate those you no longer consider important.
Please don’t hesitate to borrow from the work of David Sparks (as I have) and my modified weekly and quarterly review templates. You’ll find links to David Sparks’ posts and my review system in my blog post, The Power of Quarterly and Weekly Reviews.