STEP 1
LIVE ON PURPOSE
Here's the number one principle and our first step to working less in your life: Stop doing stuff that doesn't help you reach your goals. It sounds simple, doesn't it? It's a shame almost no one does it. The most common way we work more and do less is by working on the wrong stuff. We spend our time doing, doing, doing, even if the doing has nothing to do with our goals, business, or life. Surely I'm not the only one who has spent five hours a day spewing one-line nonsense "status updates" on my favorite social media Web site, and then wondered why I'm running so hard just to stay in the same place.
Of course, it's much easier to say "work on what's important" than it is to do it. In this first step to working less and doing more we will explore how lacking clarity about our goals both at work and at home can be our doom. I will help you overcome this problem so that you never waste time working on the wrong stuff ever again--or at least not when you follow my advice. In this chapter you will learn how to identify your ultimate goals for every situation. Then I'll explain how you can develop a life map so you'll know when you're on track and when you're just fooling yourself with busywork.
You can get hijacked into nonsense-land when you don't know what you want. Before you can streamline life, you must know your goals. If you don't know where you're going, you can't make getting there effortless. When you know your destination, you can chart a course in advance. Moment-by-moment, you can make sure you're doing things that take you where you want to go. Otherwise, all your activity is nothing more than busyness.
We'll start by making sure we're doing the right things. It's not always obvious, though sometimes your gut tells you there's got to be a better way. My friend Michael discovered that as a parent.
MEET MICHAEL
Michael was mortified. His teenager Skyler's room was, to put it mildly, like an antechamber from the inner circle of heck: strange growths on the walls, mysterious smells belching forth from unidentifiable piles beneath the bed. At night, shrieking cries could be heard from behind the closed bedroom door (is that what kids today call music?). Michael's solution was simple: Ask Skyler to clean up. When that didn't work, he offered video games as bribes. And when that didn't work, he resorted to yelling. Soon, Michael was nearing a nervous breakdown. Skyler, however, just turned up the stereo one notch and went back to what ever it is that teenagers do inside their lairs.
As Michael told this story, I tried to imagine his life. My time is spent dancing through life, smelling daffodils and singing songs. Michael's time is spent obsessing about his teenager's room. He plots and plans and bribes. When we have lunch, he hardly notices my unbelievably witty and insightful conversation. Instead, he moans about his son the whole time. As if living with the youngster wasn't bad enough, he must relive every agonizing moment out loud. Michael realized something wasn't working about the situation, but he had no idea what to do. He was providing a living case study of the most important thing you'll ever learn: The key to working less is being on purpose.
Michael doesn't wake up thinking, "My life purpose is having a kid with a clean bedroom." At some point, he decided a clean bedroom was important. He thought it was the path to some other goal. Sadly, he's forgotten the other goal and is fixated on the whole room thing. This happens to all of us--we get distracted and lose sight of our ultimate goals. We decide we want to finish that project at work by tomorrow, so we e-mail our coworker Bernice to get her notes on the project. Her response is so engaging that six hours later, we suddenly realize we've had a fabulous bonding experience with Bernice and done no work on the report.
YOU NEED TO IDENTIFY YOUR GOALS
The first step in living on purpose is to get really good at identifying goals. Big goals, little goals, medium-sized goals. Everything you do at any moment has a bunch of goals attached. You see, goals don't hang out alone; they travel in packs. Really big goals--like "be successful"--are made up of subgoals. Those are made up of smaller subgoals, and so on. Finally at the bottom are specific, concrete actions. But all these subgoals offer enticing diversions where we can conveniently get off course, giving us the chance to waste time and energy. If a subgoal wanders off course, so do we, and we never get what we want. If your highest-level work goal was to be successful at work, the following table will show you how your goals might break down.
Michael's love of clean teenage bedrooms isn't one of his highest-level goals, it's a subgoal of some larger goal. My guess: Michael's high-level goal is to be a good parent. He believes he has to do that by teaching his son to be a responsible adult (which is a subgoal). And his parents brainwashed him into thinking that being a responsible adult means having a clean bedroom, which led to his action of yelling at Skyler to clean the bedroom.
Someone else with the same high-level goal of being a good parent might have different subgoals and use different actions as a result. Their subgoal might be to spend quality time with their kid and their action might be talking to their kid about school at dinner. Or perhaps they would play baseball together, or go out for manicures together, or play baseball and go out for manicures together. Heck, if it were me, I think teaching your kid to be a responsible adult means letting a kid keep their room however they want it, and letting them deal with the consequences when the pizza grows legs. What ever your subgoals and actions, they'd better match your big goal. Otherwise while trying to be a good parent, you risk pulling a Michael. You'll spend your quality together-time yelling at your child and making them hate you.
This mismatch between goals and actions is hardly limited to parenting. One company I worked with had an overall goal of making it easy for an entire industry to adopt a new technology. A subgoal was raising funds from the board of directors, which included some prominent financiers. Their fund-raising subgoal's action was developing a prototype product to show the board. The investors would be so dazzled that they would write a big fat check. The prototype took on a life of its own, however. Even after money was raised, it lived on as an entirely separate project. It kept sucking up time and resources without contributing one bit to the original goal of building a product customers would buy. Here's how their goals broke down:
MAKE SURE YOUR ACTIONS MATCH YOUR GOALS
Living on purpose means stopping to make sure your actions still match your big goals. But you need to keep the big picture in mind to do this. Without knowing your higher-level goals, you don't know whether your actions are helping.
To understand why the big picture is important, let's consider the time-honored, time-wasting tradition, the status meeting. You might think its purpose is obvious: Share status. Yes, but what's the goal of sharing status? What's the higher-level goal here? Is it to coordinate when one person's work depends on another's? Is it to build team cohesion? Is it to brainstorm solutions to project emergencies? Is it to have an excuse to eat fat-free, low-cal, diet donuts and decaf coffee? Without knowing the goals above "share status," it's hard to know if the...