📝 👨🏽‍💻 5 Tips to Prevent Little Tasks from Hijacking and Disrupting Your Entire Day 🔎 👩🏻‍💻

Have you ever felt that you've had a busy day but not so productive? Or maybe you haven't stopped to take a breath all day but still struggle to put your head on the pillow at night satisfied that you got what you needed done? It happens to us all at some stage. I was getting ready to start my day this morning when I got an email with a request for help (NOT URGENT) and I was about to go off down the rabbit hole to find answers and ways to solve and respond to it immediately. This one tiny task was going to hijack and disrupt my morning's planned focus work session.

So, thankfully I caught myself on early enough and went back to my focused planned work. These are the wee things that can take you off track and disrupt your day, hijack your time and get you sidetracked completely.

This story is an example of those “little tasks” that we sometimes pick up  that can end up taking more time than estimated and completely hijack our morning and it’s these little tasks that will quickly eat up your entire day if you let them.

What you think is going to be a quick side task leads to a rabbit-hole of wasted time. Without discipline, a few of these small diversions can take over hours of your day.

• That one email you are going to read… only to find yourself 200 messages deep in your inbox.
• The one website you are going check… which leads to an hour of web surfing.
• That one thing you are going to do… that takes you away from your work for the rest of the morning.

Little tasks aren’t always so little… and small distractions can disrupt your entire day. So, how do you prevent these small distractions from taking up all your time?

Here are 5 Tips to Prevent these Little Tasks from Hijacking and Disrupting Your Entire Day..

1: Put the Important Things First – Make sure you put your essential tasks first. Prioritising your work is key. You can’t do everything in a day, so make sure you do the critical work first.  Putting first things first is about prioritising effectively and avoiding time wasting. It’s all too easy to avoid the challenging tasks and get on with the things that we feel comfortable doing, but ultimately this leads to important things being left behind, with often complex consequences. At work, this often ends up with us doing the tasks we like and know we’re good at or we convince ourselves that are easy and quick to get out of the way but at the cost of perhaps neglecting the more urgent/important needs. A great book by Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen and Les Hewitt and is call the Power of Focus. They talk about a simple prioritising technique you can use to stop you getting side tracked..

Sometimes when I feel myself getting sidetracked I take a few minutes on a blank page to write down the key tasks that need my attention - I starting on the left hand side of the page, writing down the top 8 priorities that I have. This helps you get out of your head in terms of organising what to focus on or determining your major priorities. 

Then I go through each pair and decide which out of the top two are more important and you whittle this down to the next level and the next level and the next level. Just by asking – what’s more important x or y ? 

It’s a simple technique that you can complete in under 4 minutes. To help you get that focus.

 2: One Touch rule - Single-Task Onesie Mindset

Multitasking may sound great, but it isn’t practical. Rather than accomplishing more, you are likely to end up with many things started and few finished. Where possible, block the time and stick to one task at a time and do it until it’s done.

The Theory: For all all incoming items, you commit to only touching them once. Specifically, this applies to emails, texts, instant messages, voicemail (and even mail or paper); anything that’s coming at you into your virtual or physical inbox.  If you don’t have time to fully respond to messages, don’t even read them until you do have time. You’ll only be distracted and thinking about it, but unable to take action.

In Practice: When you get an incoming message (email, text, instant message, voicemail, etc.) there are really only 3, straight-forward, actions available to you and you can simply choose and act accordingly:

• Archive/Tag/File — For informational message that you don’t need to respond to.
• Respond — If you can respond (with the information you have in your brain or at your fingertips), just do it.
• Add to your task list — If the message is relaying a project or task you need to do, or you just don’t have the info required to answer it yet, add to your task list, prioritise it realistically and respond to let the sender know when they should expect a full reply (or completion).

Implement the “one-touch” rule and start seeing results, both in increased time available and decreased stress.

3: Power of 3

We all have a to-do list to keep track of our work, and sometimes trying to stick to it can be a challenge. In theory when you work from your list, you stay on track and won’t wander to unrelated and miscellaneous tasks. But I also love the concept of the Power of 3 – the night before I think about the 3 non-negotiable items from that to do that I really would like to see done – those items that I know will help me sleep better the next night knowing they are completed.  They have to be doable and realistic. Stick to your power of 3 or 5, focus on the non-negotiables, in your peak energy time focus in chunk blocks of time (approx. 45-50 mins) on big tasks you need to get done or started on.

4: Use a timer for Focused Time

Sometimes we are not even aware of how much time we waste when we get hijacked down a rabbit hole of tiny tasks. Use a timer. If you don’t want to use your phone, get a clock or alarm system. Have it in front of you. Studies from the High Performance Institute have shown that focused 45-50 minute blocked out time can really help you move the needle in the big tasks, prolific quality outputs / things that matter most. Set up your environment go into airplane mode, turn on your timer and focus.

5: Clutter-Free 

Maintaining a clean place to do your work helps your mind from wandering and from you being distracted by other items lying around. This is an instance when “out of sight, out of mind” is your friend. If you are Working from home its even more important to have a spot that is clutter free. Create a space in your home that can be your own personal “workspace”. Even if this is your living room table or a desk in your bedroom! No matter where you are, Set aside that space solely for work and nothing else! Have all the stationery you need to hand, put up motivational quotes, make the environment a nice one to be in. Reducing the clutter can help you reduce and tune out the distractions around you. This can mean actions like turning off your phone, closing your email app, or perhaps putting on headphones with concentration music.

So in summary Let the Little Things Be. 5 Tips to Prevent Tiny Tasks from Hijacking Your Entire Day:

1: Put the important things first

2: Use the one touch rule where possible with a single task mindset

3: Use the Power of 3 – consider your to do list yes but really hone down on the 3 non negotiables

4: Use a timer- for your focused time

5: Clutter Free workspace and desktop.

You don’t have to pick up every small task that catches your eye. In fact, you need to “let the little things be.”

Stick to your power of 3 or 5, focus on the non-negotiables, in your peak energy time focus in chunk blocks of time (approx. 45-50 mins) on big tasks you need to get done.

The little tasks will still be waiting when you are finished.

I hope you found this helpful – please share with someone else who you think may benefit from it.

See you on the next episode – stay safe and keep on unlocking your potential.