The 6 Big Ideas:

• Prioritize the Vital Few

• What’s Your Avoid At All Cost List?

• Don’t Break Your Bright Lines

• Three Times is a Trend

• Cut Time in Half – Parkinson’s Law

• Be Prolific, Not Perfectionist

My Highlights From the Book:

Prioritize the Vital Few:

The secret to thriving in your life is the same: do fewer things. Which means you have to be strategic about what you choose to do and make hard decisions about what you choose not to. When you decide on your five areas of focus commit to spending 95% of your time there.

Doing work that matters is much harder than doing work that doesn’t. The desire to escape from hard meaningful work is ever present. So it helps to have some structure not so much that it gets in the way, but enough so you keep moving forward deliberately and intentionally. The way to make an impact in your areas of focus for the year is by spending your time focusing on those areas. Everyday. So when you create your to-do list, do it in the categories of your five things.

What’s Your Avoid At All Cost List?

To succeeding in using your time wisely, you have to ask a few more equally important but often avoided questions: what are you willing not to achieve? What doesn’t make you happy? What’s not important to you? What gets in the way? This is your ignore list.

A to-do list is a useful collection tool, it’s not our primary tool to guide our daily accomplishments. Our calendars make the perfect tool to guide our daily accomplishments because they are finite, there are only a certain number of hours in a day. It will become instantly clear the moment we try to cram an unrealistic number of things into limited spaces

To get anything done, we need the traction to initiate movement from a standstill. In many ways getting started is hardest part. I spent many hours cleaning my house, answering email, surfing the web, watching TV, in order to avoid a task. If they’re a tactic to avoid what I need and want to do, then they are distractions.

Don’t Break Your Bright Lines:

The cardinal rule of rules: never break a rule. Setting a rule and letting people break it doesn’t make them like you it just makes them ignore you.

Three Times is a Trend:

So the first time someone does something that makes me feel uncomfortable, I simply notice it. The second time, I acknowledge that the first time was not an isolated event or accident but a potential pattern, and I begin to observe more closely and plan my response. The third time? The third time I always speak to the person about it. It’s my rule of three.

I always say some version of, “I’ve noticed something three times and I want to discuss it with you.” That way we both know it’s a trend.

Cut time in half – Parkinsons Law:

Use your loss of patience to your advantage. Create unrealistically short deadlines. Cut all meetings in half. Give yourself one third the time you think you need to accomplish something.

This is how you should do everything – artificial deadlines to drive focus and attention.

Be Prolific, Not Perfectionist:

Perfectionists have a hard time starting things and an even harder time finishing them. The world doesn’t reward perfection. It rewards productivity. And productivity can be achieved only through imperfection. Make a decision. Follow through. Learn from outcome. Repeat over and over and over again. It’s a scientific method of trial and error. Only by wading through the imperfect can we begin to achieve glimpses of the perfect. Just get going.