Automate the mundane without technology

You want to learn new things, make yourself better, the best you can be. In the previous post, we position that you need to automate the mundane and routine.

When technology is not your strong suit, you can do lots of other things that take the thinking effort from those mundane tasks that need to be done.

What seems like common sense, but has been found in a few studies, is that your brain only has a finite amount of processing power. If you have had a hard and busy day, you will likely not be able to problem solve the toughest challenge near the end of it. This is especially true of will power, have you noticed that you can eat healthily throughout the day, but come to a point in the evening, and that glass of wine; bar of chocolate; piece of cake becomes almost impossible to resist?

So using that example, imagine you spend most of your effort and/or processing power on your mundane tasks, multitasking your way through and you will find that the big impact thinking that will take you or your business to the next level gets left on the list for another day.

You need to carve out specific time to enable your big impact challenges, as well as getting the tasks that need doing, done. Building on the previous posts of how to eat an elephant, sharing the load and brick by brick, this post looks at compartmentalising when you do certain tasks and grouping them together so that you are almost in automaton mode.

I recommend analysing your day and week and notice when certain things seem to ‘flow’ much better.

For me, on an average day, just after lunch is best to go through email. It is not the beginning of the day to suck me into other peoples’ requests that may side-line my priorities, but early enough for them to get an answer by the end of the business day. The start of my day is when I have the creative juices to generate client work; write blog posts; produce ideas; essentially anything that needs to be started from scratch. Coffee break over, I can do work that is wordsmithing; editing; correcting anything I have created previously (even the stuff I finish that morning). Lunch is chance to refresh before emailing.

Yep, the breakdown of my average day is not the most entertaining, but I hope it has given you an idea of when you may find your rhythm suited to certain tasks.

What I really want to pass on in this post is, don’t let anyone else hijack your agenda to the point that have no time to progress through the mundane and onto the impact. Yes, there are lots of things that may get in your way to do it every day, but as a grown adult, you can (and should) put some controls in place. If you don’t, who will for you?

Remember it is your choice: You can keep yourself busy with the mundane and routine tasks, you may even get very good at them, but remember, there are likely more people who can do it quicker, better or cheaper (or all 3) and do you want to jostle position with them? Or do you want to spend some time making changes that will show impact and create value?