Pick your battles

My wife has pseudo OCD (Obsessive-compulsive disorder) for keeping our kitchen in order, everything organized & cleaned. Despite having an army of personal staff (4 including a cook, nanny, maids), she still tries to put things in place – rejig the refrigerator, grocery, etc. – when she comes back from work!

I asked her one day, “Is this the most important thing you ‘need’ to do? Wouldn’t spending time with kids, reading books or playing with them, spending time by yourself be more important than this?”

Even at work, we come across so many managers and leaders who want to fix everything that they can see. They often need to be reminded that only because everything can be worked on, doesn’t mean we work on everything. We need to pick our battles!

A lot of them are smart people. They have the capability to change things.  But trying to change everything is what could become a derailer.

In the Managerial Effectiveness Programs & #DevelopmentJourneys we run for our customers, we cover this aspect of prioritization through a popular concept of “Doer-in-chief”. It helps doers choose tasks that they really need to work by segregating them as per following quadrant. We recommend the time one spends on each quadrant :

• Need to do and Like to do (Good Stuff) – 60%
• Need to do and Don’t Like to do (Necessary Evils)  – 25%
• Don’t Need to do and Like to do (Guilty Pleasures)  – 15%
• Don’t Need to do and Don’t Like to do (Waste of Time) – 0%

My wife still struggles to segregate her tasks at home sometimes, but a gentle reminder about this framework helps:)

What are your thoughts?