How to Stop Neglecting Activities That Will Pay Off in the Future
This fall, I owned up to it. I’d been neglecting two of my work responsibilities.
They’re the kind that are easy to neglect, though that doesn’t mean they’re unimportant.
Still, I can push them off for months and nobody calls me on it.
Meanwhile, the neglect bothers me. A subtle voice regularly reminds me that, one day, I’ll pay for the neglect.
About a month ago, I decided it was time to stop accruing a debt that my future self would have to pay.
I owned up to the neglect and set a course for consistent follow-through that I know will happen.
Do you have anything you’re neglecting? Your health? A relationship? Your faith? A part of your job that you don’t enjoy?
The Trifecta of Priority-Based Systems
You and I have systems for managing our health, our relationships, our jobs, and other areas of our lives.
Whether intentionally or not, there are routines and approaches we take throughout the day.
Our brains don’t want to spend lots of energy thinking about how to live our lives, so we offload most of our daily choices to the basal ganglia, which is the region that manages habits and automatic behavior.
Consider the way you bathe, process your inbox, and relate to your neighbors. These automatic behaviors form the systems that we use to navigate our lives and, frankly, protect ourselves.
In my coaching, research, and personal experience, I’ve found the most successful people regularly evaluate their systems and discover ways to improve them to advance their priorities.
More specifically, I’ve determined that there are three systems-based approaches that are most often responsible for ensuring that the things that matter most actually happen. You’re familiar with all of them. They are:
- Time-Boxing. Also referred to as Time-Blocking, this is scheduling your priority behaviors for sufficiently focused periods of time. Writing this article, for example, would not happen if I didn’t have 90 minutes blocked every other week on my calendar. It’s scheduled, it’s protected, and it gets moved proactively when necessary. My 90-minute block is scheduled for Friday, but I moved it this week to Thursday. Believe me, my inbox is full of people waiting to hear from me, and there are plenty of things I’d rather be doing with these 90 minutes than writing, but I’ve made a commitment to follow through on the scheduled activities that I’ve already decided matter most.
- Habit-Stacking. James Clear helped me understand that activities and behaviors have a much higher chance of happening if they follow another activity that’s highly likely to happen. Charles Duhigg called these high-likelihood activities “keystone habits,” which set off a chain reaction of other positive behaviors. For me, I place harder to do/remember activities after something else that’s pretty easy for me to do. These layers are mutually reinforcing the activities that matter most.
- Priority-Listing. Of course, keeping a to-do list is essential. What I’ve noticed in the most effective people, though, is diligence in three aspects of listing: a) They get everything out of their head and onto the to-do list to avoid ruminating, forgetting, and acting impulsively; b) they integrate lists as much as possible to do holistic prioritization; and c) they vigorously reprioritize and remove items as appropriate. This curation and cultivation of priorities ensures you do what matters most.
To get myself to embrace the activities I’d been neglecting, I intentionally employed all three of these approaches. I’m energized, and my feelings of shame and regret have faded because I’m implementing a priority-based system for doing what matters most.
What are you neglecting?
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