Stop prioritizing your tasks by importance
And start prioritizing them by this instead
There are approximately one million productivity and planning systems in the world — the Eisenhower Matrix, the Getting Things Done system, the Pareto Planner, Monday Hour One, the rock/pebble/sand method, etc. etc.
And every single one of these contains some variation of the following advice:
List out everything you have to do
Estimate how long each thing will take
Rank-order the tasks based on how important they are
Superimpose your rank-ordered, time-estimated list of tasks against your calendar and decide when you’ll do each thing
And…go!
All of this makes perfect sense in theory.
But if productivity is as simple as a few quick math calculations, why aren’t we all as productive as we want to be?
The hard part about productivity isn’t planning and calendaring.
The hard part about productivity is FEELING like doing things.
The hard part is having the emotional momentum to start + stick with difficult, scary, or complicated tasks.
And that’s the essential ingredient that all these planning methods tend to miss: Emotional momentum.
Because you are not a static automaton executing tasks one by one like a machine on a factory line 🤖
You don’t just hit the “on” button, spring to work for eight hours, and then hit the “off” button and go to sleep.
You are more like a marble in a Rube Goldberg machine, gathering, losing, and changing momentum as you run up against different objects in your path 🎳
If you’re anything like me, you start the day slowly, wondering why the heck you set your alarm so early. You warm up little by little as you get out of bed start doing things. At some point in the day, you hit your stride and get into a good groove.
And if you run into a task that’s too challenging for your current level of emotional momentum, you will stop or change directions.
Just like the marble hitting an obstacle that it doesn’t have the energy to break through — so it pings off and goes another way.
Which is why my suggestion is…
Stop prioritizing your tasks by importance.
Start prioritizing your tasks by momentum.
Your most important tasks often require the MOST momentum to get done.
They’re challenging, confusing, scary, ambiguous, complicated…
(That’s why someone is paying you the big bucks to do them — because it takes real skill to do such hard stuff!)
Starting your day with your most important, highest momentum task can be like putting a huge wooden block at the beginning of the marble run.
The marble rolls 2 inches, hits this big block, and just stops.
You don’t have the momentum to do this hard task.
You tell yourself you can’t work on anything else because nothing else is as important.
And then you’re stuck — all that’s left to do is procrastinate and feel terrible about yourself.
And it’s not that you can’t do these tasks — of course you can!
You always have a high level of intelligence and capability. That doesn’t change.
What varies is your level of emotional momentum — your confidence, your curiosity, your optimism, your sense of “I know what I’m doing,” and “I got this,” and “I bet I can figure this out” — all the stuff that lets you actually get started on the task and stick with it when it gets hard.
So plan for momentum.
Think about what your speed and direction will be when you get started or at big transition points.
(Mine is slow and pessimistic at the start of every day, and lazy and distracted at every transition point).
Set yourself up with tasks that will help you gather momentum — that will help your brain realize: “Oh yeah, I can do things!” “Hey, this seems possible!” “Maybe I do know what I’m doing!”
And then ride that momentum purposefully into the obstacle course of your most challenging tasks.
Now, all this is about setting up your external circumstances to generate the momentum you want.
This is designing the obstacle course so the marble can run along it 🎳
Coaching helps you do this…
AND coaching takes this one step further.
Coaching also teaches you how to internally change your emotional momentum even in the face of challenging tasks.
That’s like swapping out the marble for a remote-controlled car that can stop on a dime, pivot without warning, and speed up even the steepest slope 🎮
Designing the obstacle course is a very powerful tool 🛣️
Swapping your marble for a remote-controlled car is even more powerful 🚗
Coaching helps you do both.
Come see what I mean with a FREE anonymized public coaching call today.
Or let’s talk about working together so you can gain full mastery over your own user manual.
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