Ignore them

This is a piece from last August but I must’ve ignored it. Yet reddit just spotted it anew and it’s worth thinking about: the original piece argues that we must ignore some people and that the trick is to work out who.

The critical… is triage. Medical staff in a crisis must decide who requires immediate assistance, who can wait, who doesn’t need help at all, and who’s past saving. Triage for the rest of us entails not just focusing on the items that are most important and deferring those that are less important until “later,” but actively ignoring the vast number of items whose importance falls below a certain threshold.

The first step is to reframe the issue. Viewing a full inbox, unfinished to-do lists, and a line of disappointed people at the door as a sign of our failure is profoundly unhelpful. This perspective may motivate us to work harder in the hopes of someday achieving victory, but this is futile. We will never win these battles, not in any meaningful sense, because at a certain point in our careers the potential demands facing us will always outstrip our capacity, no matter how much effort we dedicate to work. So the inbox, the list, the line at the door are in fact signs of success, evidence that people want our time and attention. And ultimate victory lies not in winning tactical battles but in winning the war: Not an empty inbox, but an inbox emptied of all truly important messages. Not a completed to-do list, but a list with all truly important items scratched off. Not the absence of a line at our door, but a line with no truly important people remaining in it.

The Most Productive People Know Who to Ignore – Ed Batista, Harvard Business Review (20 August 2014)

Read the full piece.

Don’t prioritise tasks, ignore people instead

The most contentious element of The Blank Screen productivity books and workshop are to do with prioritising tasks and specifically how I really believe you’re wasting your time. While he has more to say than this, here’s a fella who puts that point thisaway:

When faced with potentially overwhelming demands on our time, we’re often advised to “Prioritize!” as if that’s some sort of spell that will magically solve the problem. But what I’ve learned in the process of helping people cope with and manage their workflow is that prioritizing accomplishes relatively little, in part because it’s so easy to do. Let’s define the term: Prioritizing is the process of ranking things—the people who want to take up our time, items on our to-do list, messages in our Inbox—in order of importance. While this involves the occasionally difficult judgment call, for the most part it’s a straightforward cognitive task. When looking at a meeting request, a to-do list, or an email we have an intuitive sense of how important it is, and we can readily compare these items and rank-order them.

Here’s the problem. After we prioritize, we act as though everything merits our time and attention, and we’ll get to the less-important items “later.” But later never really arrives. The list remains without end.

The Most Productive People Know Who to Ignore – Ed Batista, Fast Company (20 August 2014)

My argument is that we’re writers, usually working freelance or for more many editors, and the moment you’ve got your lovely list all prioritised up is the moment when one of those people phones you with an emergency. But Batista’s full piece goes on specifically to say that we need to be a bit callous about who we do and don’t pay attention to. He maintains that that our work is done when there are “no truly important people” waiting on us. And then:

[W]hen you read the phrase, “no truly important people,” above, you probably flinched a little and thought it was somewhat callous. I flinch when I read it, too, and I wrote it! But this understandable response is exactly why we devote time and attention to people who don’t truly merit the investment. There’s a fine line between effective triage and being an asshole, and many of us are so worried about crossing that line that we don’t even get close.

He goes on to explain his reasoning in much more detail and also to provide specifics about why and how to do this but let me summarise: there are just people with demands on your time that you do not care about.

Harsh but true. So accept that you’re more fussed about this person or that client and work to get what they need done.

That’s not to say you can or should be rude to everyone else, mind: it’s nice to be smart but it’s smart to be nice.