What are you doing?
During this week, I noticed that I was having trouble going to sleep. Anyone that knows me knows that I rarely have trouble sleeping. I can sleep anywhere, even on turbulent waters! The ability to fall asleep fast and block things out has been an enormous blessing to me. Anyway, I found out that I was having trouble sleeping, and I felt my heart racing. As I struggled with sleep, I began to question myself — What’s wrong? Why is my heart racing right now? Am I worried about something? It did not take me long to realize what caused the struggle. I had too many tasks with converging deadlines during this week, so I was worried and stressed that I might not finish it.
You may wonder and say, “oh, it is alright to have too much to do!” Well, for me, it is not, and it should not be for anyone. Having multiple concurrent tasks fighting for our attention only reduces the concentration that we can give one, thereby increasing the possibility of errors and low-quality output. But this raises a question — why do we take on too much? In many cases, we have a sincere desire to add value and be more productive.
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Many articles on self-development and growth encourage us to structure our day, use to-do lists, plan for every minute of the day, all in a bid to do more in a day. While these tactics and many more are helpful, there is an essential factor influencing their effects. Previous research found that:
knowledge workers spend a great deal of their time — an average of 41% — on discretionary activities that offer little personal satisfaction and could be handled competently by others.
The results of this research indicate that if you do more unimportant work with all the methods listed earlier, you feel busy and probably essential, but you are not adding value. So the question: “how can I add value?” becomes very easy to answer. Do important or value-added work. We do not need to do more with the limited hours in a day but rather focus on the wildly important. Delegate or refuse tasks that are not important to you as much as possible. Usually, we can not delegate or restrict all unnecessary tasks, but we can substantially reduce them by learning to say “no.”
Returning to my struggle with sleep, I realized that I was doing too many unnecessary tasks. Therefore, as I lay on the bed, I decided to focus on the essential tasks while rejecting the rest. As I made this decision, my heart slowed down, and the next thing I knew, it was morning.
