785: Make Your Task List Work for You, with Liane Davey

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:00]:
Oh, we all love to hate our task lists. However, we can do a lot better with just a bit of strategy. In this episode, how to make our task list work for us instead of against us. This is Coaching for Leaders, episode 785.

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:19]:
Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, Maximizing Human Potential.

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:27]:
Greetings to you from Orange County, California. This is Coaching for Leaders, and I’m your host, Dave Stachowiak. Leaders aren’t born, they’re made. And this weekly show helps leaders thrive at key inflection points. You know, one of the challenges that we all face every single day when we wake up, when we get working, is what do we do? Like, literally, what are we going to spend our time on? We all have different systems for doing that. Some of us keep it in our head, some of us look at our calendar first, and many of us have a task list. How do we use our task list in a way that actually makes it work for us and not work against us, which happens so often when we start making lists? Today, a conversation on how we can look at this aspect of time management, of productivity, to help us to be better and make our task list work for us.

Dave Stachowiak [00:01:24]:
I’m so pleased to welcome Liane Davey to the show. For the past 25 years, Liane has researched and advised teams on how to achieve high, high performance. She is the author of You First and The Good Fight and is a regular contributor to Harvard Business Review. She is the author of the new book Thoughtload: Manage the Madness and Free Your Team to Do Great Work. Liane, so lovely to have you on.

Liane Davey [00:01:49]:
I’m very excited for this conversation, Dave.

Dave Stachowiak [00:01:52]:
I am, too, because I saw the title of your book, I saw the word “thoughtload”, I read about four sentences, and I was like, “okay, that’s me. That’s me and pretty much everyone else that I talk to”. This is just the… This is just the reality of the world we live in right now. And the technology is- It’s not even so much sometimes the work, it’s all the stuff, the thinking, isn’t it?

Liane Davey [00:02:19]:
It’s all the stuff: The thinking, the feeling, the energy. It’s all the things. Most people tell me now, “It’s not the workload. If I could just do the work, it would be great. It’s everything else.”

Dave Stachowiak [00:02:30]:
Yeah, yeah. You know, one of the quotes that landed with me from the book, so much is, you write: What if it’s not the workload that’s killing you? Most people I talk to would be thrilled if they could just do the work. What if it’s not the workload? What if it’s the thoughtload? When you think about this word, thoughtload, what are you thinking about? And how does that show up and manifest for us?

Liane Davey [00:02:54]:
Yeah. So thoughtload, I think of it as an invisible tax on our performance. And it comes from a treacherous triad of three things. First, increasing cognitive demands. So, the amount we are expected to pay attention to on any given day now, we can talk about some of the scary stats, but those cognitive demands are going up and up and up, plus the emotional burdens, the ways we are emotionally triggered all day, every day. And sometimes the calls come in from inside the house. It’s your own nasty narrator that’s causing the issues.

Liane Davey [00:03:30]:
And sometimes it’s, sometimes it’s Betty, who perched her right butt cheek on your desk and unloaded or vented all of her issues. So it comes or, of course, from the most socially anxious generation of kids that we’re raising, right? So that’s the load, is the cognitive demands and the emotional burdens. Now imagine that you have to carry that load, and some days, the energy reserves, the physical, mental energy to carry that load. Some days you’ve got it, and some days you just don’t.

Liane Davey [00:03:58]:
So those three things, cognitive demands, emotional burdens, and energy reserves, together make up your thoughtload.

Dave Stachowiak [00:04:05]:
Well, this is a good lead into thinking about task lists, because when I think about what most people’s task lists look like, including my own, although with one caveat, which I’ll mention later probably, but is, we have one giant list of all the stuff that we need to do in our lives. Maybe there’s a distinction between work and personal, but generally we’ve got either one or two of those lists. We got all the work stuff, and then we’ve got all the personal stuff, or it’s all in one place. And we put everything on it, and that is, that is not always the healthiest thing, is it?

Liane Davey [00:04:39]:
No, we say to-do lists are evil? They’re terrible for so many reasons. So many reasons.

Dave Stachowiak [00:04:48]:
Yeah, you write on this: To-do lists are terrible for managing your attention, not to mention managing your anxiety or maintaining your energy, because they force you to confront your daunting backlog all in one place with no help in discerning what to focus on first. And I think about that when I look at the big list. That’s so common for so many of us, isn’t it?

Liane Davey [00:05:11]:
Absolutely. And of course, everything in this book is there because it was something I was doing. Like, as with most authors, I wrote this book because I needed to read this book. So my to-do list was exactly that: Everything, everywhere, all at once. A list of 20 things, of which in a day full of keynotes or client meetings or whatever else, I could maybe get through three. So I was staring at the 20 things for a week, or two weeks without being able to cross them off. They just taunt me.

Liane Davey [00:05:38]:
“I’m still here, Liane, like, my ink is fading. You wrote me so long ago”. Or, your mess gets, your to-do list gets so messy you start a new one, and you’re writing the same thing on the third new list because you still haven’t done, you’ve been procrastinating it. So there’s a lot that’s very triggering about a to-do list.

Dave Stachowiak [00:05:57]:
Yeah. And this is where I think we can do a lot better, all of us, by making some, some really helpful strategic shifts. And you have some really great ways to think about this. And one of them is, rather than thinking about a task list as an entire laundry list of everything, is to actually be intentional about categorizing and creating three different lists. Could, could you share what the three lists are? And I’d love to, I’d love to get into some of the details of looking at each one of these, but maybe you could paint the picture first of kind of the big picture.

Liane Davey [00:06:35]:
Yeah. So, the big picture, we have to take one quick step back, which is to say, we have to think about how we’re managing our attention. And most of us manage our attention based on activity. What are the things that I have to do? The things that are on the list. We need to shift away from that, because if you manage your life based on activity, all you become is busy and tired. We need to move from that to paying attention to output. What do I have to finish or create? What code do I have to ship, or what report do I have to send? And even that, while it takes us from being busy and tired to at least being productive, that’s a big trap. In our world, thinking and measuring and evaluating and taking our sense of self-efficacy from whether we were productive or not is another trap.

Liane Davey [00:07:19]:
We need to go one notch further and get to what are the outcomes? What are the ways I’m trying to change the world? And when we pay attention to outcomes, then we become effective. So that’s the first thing to think about, because you want your lists to actually be lists in service of an outcome, not just a whole laundry list of activity. So if we start there, then I would say your first priority list is, what are the most important things I need to be doing to move the needle on the outcomes that are most important to me? So, based on your role, or your job description, or what you’re there to do in your organization, based on what is the most important way the world needs to be different, and then what are the 1, 2, 3 things that you are going to put your energy into this week to come closer to that outcome? Maybe it’s some kind of an output you have to create, maybe it’s an activity you have to do. But the first thing is, the first list is about, what are the things that are most important to my role here? So that’s list one. List two, if we’re honest, we all need to take part or play some role or add some value to somebody else’s most important outcome.

Liane Davey [00:08:38]:
You know, maybe you’re in a, in a professional services firm and they’re starting a new industry group, and you’re the one who’s the software industry guru. So they, they need you to come and help them get that set up. Okay, well, that may be something uniquely I can do. Seems very valuable. I need the list of things where I’m going to contribute to somebody else’s very important and meaningful outcome. And then list three is, if you work in an organization, even if that organization is just you, there’s probably a bunch of side quests you got to do in your week. You and I, we got to send an invoice if we’re going to keep the lights on, or, I got to book travel for my keynotes or whatever else.

Liane Davey [00:09:19]:
And so that’s the first concept, and we’ll talk about how to put those lists in order in a sec. But the first concept is, those three things are on three separate lists. And, there’s a difference between what are the things that are serving my most important role, my unique value? That’s list one. What are the things that are allowing me to contribute and add value, and support other very meaningful work going on in the organization? And then we all have to, we work in, you know, organizations that are publicly traded or regulated or whatever else. We have some side quests we have to do, and we need to have all three of those lists, but not pretending that one is equally important or central as the others.

Dave Stachowiak [00:10:06]:
Yeah. And it allows you to think much more intentionally about where am I, where am I using my time well? And I really appreciate the distinction you made, especially with the first category of, rather than just activity, of thinking more intentionally about outputs and outcomes especially. And I think oftentimes the tendency is if we don’t approach our task list with some sort of strategy, the tendency is to pull things off the list that feel productive because they’re activities, but aren’t necessarily the things that truly fall in category one that are the things that are going to be- drive the outcomes of my role. And one of the reasons is we sort of, I think a lot of us know that intellectually, and we even see ourselves doing it sometimes. When you’re working with someone and helping them to elevate out of the like, okay, I’m just working through my list all day long. What is it that helps people to start to see the distinction just between an activity or even an output, and what belongs on the list that’s truly in that category of outcome?

Liane Davey [00:11:15]:
Yeah. So starting usually with something outside of the organization is helpful. Right? Because we get so wrapped up in our day-to-day. So, talking about what’s happening in the world, how is it affecting your industry? What does it mean for your company? How is it changing what you need to pay attention to? How is it changing the value your company needs you to add? Right? So, starting with external questions. As an organizational psychologist, one of the reasons I like that is if you start with looking at how people are spending their time, it feels judgmental, and it’s easy to get defensive about, well, here’s why I’m doing it that way. If you start with something with a little bit more distance, a little bit longer time horizon, it’s easier, it’s not so close, and it’s not so emotionally laden.

Liane Davey [00:12:03]:
So you can start there and getting to, okay, so what’s the most important thing this quarter that has to be different? If you’ve really added value in your role this quarter, what’s different in the world? And starting from there, and then backing up to the conversation about, all right, well, you can’t control that. You can’t control an outcome. Right? It’s something you’re accountable for but don’t have control of, which is very emotionally triggering and scary, that I could be held accountable for something I don’t control. So then you have to back up and go, okay, so what are the things you could produce, the things that you could make happen, the things you do control that would make that outcome more likely? Let’s get that on the list, and then let’s have a conversation about prioritizing those. Which one do you think is, got the most leverage? Which of those outputs is going to make the biggest difference? Based on what? What evidence do you have? What data you have, do you have… You know, those sorts of questions. And then from there, if you understand, this is the number one most important output I have to deliver first, and this is what I need to deliver second. All right, then what are the activities that, that really do add value and help you deliver that? And, and then you start to see the Time Bandits, right? Like, why am I doing that? What am I doing? And Time Bandits may be just a task that, or an activity that’s useless.

Liane Davey [00:13:22]:
But more commonly for most of us, it comes in the form of work that has bloated beyond what’s useful for getting the output or the outcome. So, you know, I’ve got that three-hour meeting, and you say, okay, well, how many hours or minutes of that three-hour meeting are meaningfully contributing to your ability to deliver that output? And people are like, well, the first half hour is usually pretty good. Okay, or in that research you’re doing, how many hours did you spend on that or in producing that PowerPoint file, how many of the hours were really getting to the right thought and the right insight, versus how many hours were finding stock images that you used in an internal presentation for God knows what reason? So that’s, that’s the backward process. I would say, start far out, ideally kind of outside the organization, to get some insight about what needs to change. Go from there to how the world needs to be different, the outcomes, the ways that you will know that what you’re doing is working, from there to the highest leverage outputs you could deliver to achieve those outcomes, and from there to the essential core, most potent tasks and activities you could do to deliver those outputs. So we just, we all work with activities, outputs, and outcomes all the time. We just tend to start with activities and hope that if we do enough activities, maybe the world will change in the way we hoped. And I’m like, never did anyone ever say that getting to inbox zero changed the world in the way I wanted it to change.

Liane Davey [00:14:54]:
It just doesn’t work that way. But that’s, we’re all on that hamster wheel right now.

Dave Stachowiak [00:14:58]:
Oh, it’s so- Well, that’s where the trap is on, so much of this is like, it’s really easy to pull up a tax list, have 14 things on it, have marked off 10 of the things today, feel like you’ve been really productive, and to entirely miss the fact that the actual only thing you should have been working on was number 13.

Liane Davey [00:15:16]:
Yep. And you know that you’re in that when you’ve actually done a few things that weren’t on your to-do list, and then that’s annoying, so you write them on the list just to cross them off, right? That’s how you know you’re in the trap. You’re in there.

Dave Stachowiak [00:15:31]:
You write on this: A brain choked by high thought load is terrible at differentiating what’s important versus what’s trivial. You have to prioritize. In the spirit of prioritization, when you think about this category one list, and I suspect this is also true for two and three. How do you know how much to get on the list?

Liane Davey [00:15:50]:
Yeah, absolutely. So I have a tool, a tool I share in the book called a ThoughtLoad Planner, which just allows me to look at my week and first put in all the non-negotiables. I’m giving a speech today, which means I’m going to be at the airport and whatever. So I’m going to have two open hours. That’s it. So let’s not put 12 things on today’s list because then I’m just going to feel badly, and it’s going to sit in my thought load. These 12 things, let me put in the number that I will actually be able to do on this day. So that’s why this ThoughtLoad Planner tool is really helpful, is because I’ve put in the scheduled things first, the meetings, this is the day I have to leave work early to pick up the kids for whatever, their dance lessons or whatever.

Liane Davey [00:16:33]:
I’ve put that in so that the only things I’m putting in my list for today are the things that are going to be in my workload today, not in my thoughtload only. So, as I’m doing so, that’s the first thing. Like, do something reasonable, look at what today is, and don’t put 12 things in if you can only do two. And then you want to use a triage to figure out what gets to be number one, and what gets to be number two, and number three. And I triage with four questions. First question: Is it important? So, is doing that thing going to make a meaningful difference on the outcome I care about? That’s number one. And if the answer is no, delete it. Why are you doing it? If the answer is yes, go to question two: Is it urgent? Will doing it today mean it has greater opportunity, greater payoff, and less risk? Or is it possible that doing it next week would mean no less opportunity, no more risk, and maybe I’d be able to do it better, or there’d be more information, or just in time.

Liane Davey [00:17:36]:
So second question is urgency. Third question is uniqueness. To me, a lot of leaders, when they decide to get involved with something, they ask themselves the question, can I add value on that? And it’s a terrible question when you’re a leader, because the answer is, you probably can. You probably can add value on almost everything. The better question is, can I add unique value on that? Is that value only I can add? So the third question is: is that absolutely best done by me, or could someone else do it more efficiently, more effectively? Am I stealing someone’s learning opportunity so that if I do it, somebody who would love to do it loses the chance? So that’s the third question. And the fourth question is, how essential is it? And that goes back to that work bloat concept, which is, could I do 20% of this and get 80% of the value? Could I go to half that meeting and get everything that I need? So I use those four criteria to triage, and then based on that, I assign my number one, number two, and number three to my- each of my lists.

Dave Stachowiak [00:18:37]:
I love it. And you saying that reminded me of a real mistake that I made that actually contributed a ton to my thoughtload. For several years, I have had a practice with my friend Scott regularly of, every morning, pulling up my task list, and we talk with each other for five or ten minutes every morning, and we identify, like, what are big two or three things each day? And I would say I’ve, we’ve both been pretty good about sticking to the category one, category two things on those big three on our list each day. Where I really messed this up, though, was when I first started doing that practice is on a day when I’d have a lot of things scheduled, like, I’d have an interview, like, with you, or I’d facilitate one of our academy sessions, or my day was fairly spoken for, by the way, on really important things to stakeholders.

Liane Davey [00:19:25]:
Very meaningful things.

Dave Stachowiak [00:19:26]:
Yeah, yeah, really important things.

Liane Davey [00:19:27]:
Good stuff.

Dave Stachowiak [00:19:28]:
What I would do is I would, I would mentally put those things of, like, okay, those are things that are scheduled. And now I need to have on my list two or three things that I also need to do today that are really important in that category. And what I ran into was two things. One is, I’m never gonna get two or three other big things done on a date, like, my whole, it seems so obvious saying this out loud, but, like, it took me a while to kind of figure this out. But what also was really interesting is I would sometimes catch myself in the middle of an interview and a session, something that’s really important to me and my stakeholders, and I’d be thinking about the other things that were still on the list.

Liane Davey [00:20:09]:
We’ve all done that.

Dave Stachowiak [00:20:10]:
Yeah.

Liane Davey [00:20:11]:
So painful. Because they see your eyes gloss over for a minute and…

Dave Stachowiak [00:20:15]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Liane Davey [00:20:17]:
So, thoughtload, I talk about this, you know, when I originally started defining thoughtload, I defined it as attacks on our performance, but I’ve now come to talk about thoughtload as attacks on our presence. Because if you’re in the midst of the academy, and you’re with a room full of people, who are just hanging on every word, and you’re all of a sudden, like, off somewhere, working on another task in your brain or just fretting about it, your presence is diluted by thoughtload. So I think that one’s really- Let me add a third risk of that one.

Dave Stachowiak [00:20:47]:
Yeah, please.

Liane Davey [00:20:48]:
Because the other thing that’s so interesting- So my favorite chapter in the book is called “Do More Nothing”. And it’s about how do we reenergize ourselves? And it comes from an insight from a Michael Pollan Netflix documentary about cooking, where he talks about bread, and how you could eat all the flour and drink all the water in the world, and you would soon after starve to death. But if you mix the flour and the water, and left them exposed to the air, where they would collect yeast, and baked that, it would turn into bread, and that would nourish you indefinitely. So if you think about that day, that’s had, you know, a podcast interview with somebody you find interesting, a Leadership Academy session, whatever else, and then you rush back to your office and try and do three new things. What I would say is, your brain pantry is super full. You are choking yourself on flour and drinking from the fire hose of water, but you have lost any opportunity to expose that to the air and get wisdom and insight from it. So that’s another huge thing I realize when I’m watching this documentary about bread.

Liane Davey [00:21:54]:
All of a sudden, I have this epiphany that I am choking myself, nearly waterboarding myself on how much input I’m getting, but never prioritizing the air, which is where that then becomes nourishing, where I get wisdom out of it, insight out of it, creativity out of it. The next thing I can write about or talk about in the Leadership Academy, in the next session. So, that’s the other risk of just trying to stay focused on activity, is thinking that producing all the time is going to make us effective. You’re much more likely to be effective if you said, I’m going to go home after leadership academy, I’m going to go for a walk. And I’m going to just let that all percolate, going to let it turn into a few, like those moments where you’re walking, you have to open your phone and do a voice memo, because something really good comes up. So that’s the other risk is that if we’re on this hamster wheel and focused on just, you know, are we doing enough activities and producing enough stuff, we miss that. A lot of effectiveness comes from exposing this very full brain pantry to air.

Dave Stachowiak [00:22:59]:
Yeah. Yeah. I love the bread analogy, it’s so true. And I eventually, a couple years ago, kind of came to this place of like, oh, when I have two or three things, those are my two or three things on my list for the day, and that’s it. And you know what’s nice is, to your point, it does two things really well. One is, helps you stay really present in the moment where you are the most important things. But the other thing is, at the end of the day, you, like, leave,

Dave Stachowiak [00:23:25]:
And you think, I wasn’t trying to be unrealistic, you leave feeling like you’ve had success because you’re like, the big three, I did it. And you’re not trying to fool yourself that you can do more than that, and again, this all sounds so obvious, like, saying this out loud now, but I ran into, for years, I was sort of deluding myself on this. And I see this all the time with our, the leaders in our community as well.

Liane Davey [00:23:47]:
We are so programmed to think multitasking is, and I know this because I caught myself walking down the stairs while trying to put on a hoodie, and of course, wiped out because, you shouldn’t put on a hoodie while walking down the stairs. And it was great, it was a great learning moment to be like, what was that about? What is going on that my brain is telling me this fiction that you are in such a hurry, it’s so busy, you can’t afford to wait three seconds? It’s not a long staircase, I got to tell you that you can’t wait three seconds to either be on the stairs or be putting on a hoodie. So that’s what our default state is right now.

Liane Davey [00:24:26]:
It’s this sense of urgency. And you know what CEOs keep saying to me, I don’t think our people have a sense of urgency. And I don’t think that’s the problem. I think they have urgency for everything, which is kind of spilling out into the wrong stuff. And what they don’t have is, focus on list one, list two, and list three. So the urgency is really affecting our, our mental health, affecting our stress, and our energy, and the quality of our work. Because we’re making this mistake of trying to, thinking that more, more, more, more flour, more water, like, no. So it’s a huge problem.

Liane Davey [00:25:02]:
And I am the first to admit, that was me, who writes about this? who studies this? Going down the stairs, putting on a hoodie.

Dave Stachowiak [00:25:09]:
Yeah. Well, this is, this is great.

Dave Stachowiak [00:25:13]:
We’ve been talking, I think mostly about category one, the first list. If we, if we shift the spotlight a bit to the second list, the category two of what are you doing to help others achieve their outcomes. And I think it’s like really smart to separate these things. I had never thought about doing that until, like, getting into your work. Of course, like, it could really easily get into a place where, like all of a sudden, you’ve got a whole slew of like category two things that you’ve agreed to do for other people.

Liane Davey [00:25:39]:
Oh, yeah, oh yeah.

Dave Stachowiak [00:25:40]:
How do you approach this? What’s different about this than number one, as far as how to think and, prioritize what gets on that list and what doesn’t?

Liane Davey [00:25:47]:
Yeah, this is hard. This is really hard, in some ways, list one is easier than list two. List two, I would also really encourage you to work with your own manager in figuring out list two. So, list two is really about, you know, what are the most important things for the organization? If there’s a key strategic priority, and I am a linchpin in that, well, that needs to be very high on the list. If there’s urgency, the same triage we talked about.

Liane Davey [00:26:12]:
But what’s really interesting is, in list two, you have to confront a lot of your own narratives and a lot of your own self-esteem. So there you have to, you have to confront your need to be included. FOMO is a huge problem in whittling down list two. Right? If you’ve got FOMO problems, if you think your value to the organization and your status in the group comes from how many things are on your second list, how many things you’re a part of, that’s going to be a huge problem. One of the tools we had to build to go with the book is how to deal with FOMO guide. Right? So that’s a big thing.

Liane Davey [00:26:47]:
You know, your own desire to be helpful or included. There’s a lot of people who I see, they’re like, well I can take that on myself. I’d rather do that than, you know, overwork someone else. I’m like, why? Like, why is it better that you’re overworked? Like why? So, it also, the other thing about category two is that, you know, everyone else in the organization is very happy to put things on your category two list, and it requires productive conflict if you’re going to try and say no to some of those things. And some people would just say I would rather work till midnight than have a productive conflict with somebody about why this isn’t the best use of my time. So there’s a lot of messiness in List 2. List 1 is more of a- In the vertical relationships, I know things I can cope with, things in my control.

Liane Davey [00:27:37]:
List two is lots of difficult cross-functional team dynamics, lots of inner monologue issues to deal with. So yeah, list two is a little messy.

Dave Stachowiak [00:27:48]:
When you see somebody really engage with the messiness, and they turn the corner a bit, and they start to really get control of list 2, what is it that’s different about how they’re thinking about it than before they got there?

Liane Davey [00:28:04]:
Yeah, that’s a great, great question. So it is that difference between value and unique value is one of the biggest ones. So I’ll give you a real example that I think I tell in the book. So working with a software firm, a cloud technology firm, and the head of engineering, you know, the head of engineering, and the main unique value of engineering was to build the product, right? But at some point over time, there was a bunch of stuff that marketing wanted and needed that required somebody in the code and working on the product, or at least tangentially to the website. And originally, the leader of engineering had been a very team-oriented person, just tell me what you need.

Liane Davey [00:28:45]:
And then she came under a lot of pressure around her head count, and she started saying this stuff we’re doing for marketing, it’s really not unique to us. That’s the kind of work that could easily be outsourced as a contract to another vendor, probably offshore, at a better, like all those sorts of things. And when she finally was able to say, ” We’re not going to do that anymore, it doesn’t make sense. It dilutes our focus on category one activities. It’s not unique to us. It’s something you could much more easily find someone else to do”. And so that was the big shift. Was going from can we do it right? Which the answer was like yeah sure, to should we do it? Because we’re the optimal people to do it.

Liane Davey [00:29:31]:
And moving to that, are we the optimal people to do it? Is the major question shift when, when you really get a handle on list two, that’s figuring out what should be on list two. And then as I alluded to before the implementing that, the key thing is this is worth fighting for because I’m not being a bad team player by having this productive conflict. I’m actually being the person who is focusing my energy on the things the company needs most from me. So it’s two reframes. First, from value to unique value, and secondly, from thinking of that as I’m being a poor team player if I challenge that to, “That’s exactly what my company needs from me, is be willing to fight for my attention and energy going to the most critical things”.

Dave Stachowiak [00:30:19]:
I love it. All right, list three, we mentioned it earlier, the administrative stuff, right? Like the invoices, compliance, like those kinds of things that we all, we all need to do. And you write on this, one point that I just think is really great is, you say: Complete as many as possible in the allotted time, then beg forgiveness for the rest. You’re doing the most important things, and that’s what counts. And I just, I love that message because the reality is, we’re never going to get everything done on all on any of these categories. Right? But if you’re going to drop the ball on something, I think a lot of times the administrative stuff’s easy to knock out, and we tend not to drop the ball on that.

Dave Stachowiak [00:30:59]:
And the invitation I hear from you is like, if you’re going to drop balls, drop it on list three. Don’t be dropping it on list one and two. Like, it’s almost the opposite of sometimes how we think about it.

Liane Davey [00:31:10]:
Yeah. If you’re gonna drop a ball, drop the rubber one, not the glass one. Yeah, hello! Yeah, so a lot of those, like, have you done the compliance training? It’s, “No, you know what? I haven’t done the compliance training because we had our biggest account go to RFP, and it was the presentation this week. And so all of my mindshare went into that. And at the same time, there was something really important that was going on for one of the other account teams where they needed me to come and support them. And so I made time for that.

Liane Davey [00:31:41]:
And, and I even did the, you know, got my timesheet in, or sent the invoice, or followed up on the ar. But you know what? I didn’t get to the compliance training”. And that’s something we have to get better at doing, is saying, look, have I asked the hard questions about how to prioritize the side quests? So don’t skip the thing that’s going to get the company in trouble with the ICC. Like, I get that, right? But prioritize that list and get through as many as you can. But you have a great story to tell.

Liane Davey [00:32:16]:
If you can show that you’ve diligently made progress on the most important things, and that’s another one that you can take to your manager. If you have a weekly huddle with your manager, you can just say, look, this is what’s on my three lists. There’s five things that may hit your inbox that are on my side quest. I just want to make sure I’ve put them in the order that works for you. Which of these needs to be done first? And make that something where you’ve already got your manager aligned, and then, having your back if somebody follows up on the compliance. Your manager’s really happy to say that. I’m really pleased with the way this person prioritized. And I got it, they’ll get it to you.

Liane Davey [00:32:55]:
That’ll be top of their list next week. So that’s a perfect thing to not just try to go it alone and hope you’ve prioritized them correctly, but to show your manager that you’re really on top of things, you’re taking accountability, and get their alignment about, is this the right order?

Dave Stachowiak [00:33:09]:
I used to do some of that with my manager years ago when I was at Carnegie. And boy, it’s almost always like 80, 90% of the time when I’d have that proactive conversation, they’re like, yep, focus on one and two, and then, don’t worry about the other stuff now. And once in a while, they’d say, like, nope, you gotta do the thing by Wednesday night, the compliance thing, cause we gotta get it done. And then like, you know, that’s so helpful.

Liane Davey [00:33:30]:
Yeah, that’s so like, okay, great, I’ll do it, right? Yeah, yeah.

Dave Stachowiak [00:33:34]:
And you just, when I think about people who get into trouble, quote unquote, it’s, it’s like, yeah, I mean, sometimes you get a slap on the wrist for not doing some of the administrative stuff, but it’s really the people who aren’t doing the category one and two things consistently. That’s what gets you in trouble in your career, in trouble in quotes, but you, you just don’t move the needle on your career. You don’t move the needle for your team if you’re not disciplined about spending the time we’ve been talking about today.

Liane Davey [00:34:01]:
Yeah, I think not doing category, I love that, not doing category three gets you in trouble in air quotes. Right? Not doing category one or category two gets you in trouble, like so, yes, it’s a very important distinction.

Liane Davey [00:34:15]:
And yet we’re more likely to hear about it and have an aversive emotional experience for missing a side quest than we are for missing a category one activity. And that’s part of the problem.

Dave Stachowiak [00:34:27]:
Isn’t that so true? Yep. Okay, this is great. You’ve been studying this for a long time. You’ve worked with lots of teams. You’ve helped a lot of leaders think about this much more effectively. I’m curious, when you think about, maybe productivity in general, just maybe the task list specifically in the last few years, what have you changed your mind on?

Liane Davey [00:34:47]:
The one interesting one, it’s not quite the to-do list specifically, but it’s the whole as a manager, thinking that having an open-door policy was doing anybody any favors. And I used to be that manager. Anytime interrupt me, here’s my home number, right? I was that person. And, and I came back to this, you know, value versus unique value. I came back to the, what am I teaching people about focus and the value of attention and prioritization if I can’t even do it for myself? If I’m saying, interrupt me and make your priorities my priorities at any moment of the day? And it was, that was a hard lesson to learn. Because I think so many of us are trained that the good leader has an open door policy, and like, no, you know what? Shut the door sometimes.

Liane Davey [00:35:41]:
Not just so that I can work effectively, but so I show them, this is a team where we respect focus, where we care about prioritization, where we don’t impose our priorities on other people, and I want them to see that in action. So, I think the biggest thing I changed my mind on was an open-door policy.

Dave Stachowiak [00:36:01]:
Liane Davey is the author of Thoughtload: Manage the Madness and Free Your Team to Do Great Work. If you are thinking about, “Ooh, Thoughtload is an issue for me right now”. I think it’s a great place to go. We only talked about two or three pages of the book, there’s so much more. Liane, thank you so much for your work, I so appreciate it.

Liane Davey [00:36:19]:
Thanks so much, Dave,

Dave Stachowiak [00:36:27]:
If this conversation was helpful for you, three other episodes that fit very well with it. One of them is episode 332: The scientific secrets of daily scheduling. Daniel Pink was my guest on that episode, and we talked about how to think about utilizing your time each day. And there is a ton of science behind this. Daniel has researched so much of it and shared so much of it in that episode with us, and it changed a lot of my thinking on how and when I do certain tasks during the day. And I’m thinking about that, especially in the context of these three different lists. So much from Daniel that’ll help you to implement this in a way that really makes your energy level work for you. Episode 332 for that. Also recommended, episode 431: Align your calendar to what matters.

Dave Stachowiak [00:37:14]:
Nir Eyal was my guest on that episode, and we talked about calendar. We didn’t talk about calendar very much in this conversation, there’s a bunch more in Liane’s book about calendar. But, one of the things that, once we get a sense of, what are those most important things on the task list, my next step is putting into my calendar. And we talk through the strategy of how to do that in that episode. How to use time blocking well, how to make sure that your calendar doesn’t become entirely run by other people, so that you can get the most important things done, so you can best help other people in your organization. Episode 431 on exactly where to start. And then finally, I’d recommend the recent episode with Guy Winch. Episode 783: How to take back your evenings. Guy talked about the reality that a lot of stress doesn’t actually happen at work while we’re working the task list.

Dave Stachowiak [00:38:01]:
It happens later in the evening when we’re thinking about it, when we’re ruminating. And we talked in that conversation, how do you handle the out-of-work time? How do you take back your evening? And also, what do you do during that time to make sure that that time is really for you and your family, or whoever’s important in your life. Episode 783 for that. All of those episodes you can find on the coachingforleaders.com website, and I’d invite you today to set up your free membership at coachingforleaders.com because it’s going to give you access to the entire library of episodes that I’ve aired since 2011. And one of the big categories we have been filing things under is productivity, of course, this episode is going to be filed under there, as are many others. Whether it’s calendar tasks or just thinking about how to be more productive with your time and resources, that’s a great place to start.

Dave Stachowiak [00:38:47]:
Go over and set up your free membership at coachingforleaders.com. Coaching for Leaders is edited by Andrew Kroeger. On Monday, this coming Monday, I’m going to be welcoming Phil Le-Brun to the show. We’re going to be talking about the problem with reorgs and how to do better. So many of us have been through reorgs, and we know how challenging they can be. Phil’s got the some wonderful advice for us on the research on how we can actually do a better job of working through them. Join me for that conversation with Phil, and I’ll see you back on Monday.