What’s been the single most impactful thing you’ve learned this week? Without a shadow of a doubt, for me, it’s this powerful little process on how to get all of the endless ‘to do’s’ and ideas out of your head and into some kind of order that you can get high leverage results from. It’s a subtle distinction that can see us taking a traditional to do list and supercharging it.
This process really resonated and I’ll be intentionally applying it going forwards to help our property business, our family and each key area in the wheel of life.
Here’s Tony’s process:
This technique can pretty much relate to anyone at any point of time in their busy week and it relates to us all having a million and one things floating round our heads. We need a method to capture what’s in our heads, pull it out and put it into one separate place (a capture list which can be paper or digital) – we need to be able to let things go from our mind and create more mental space.
Here’s the big distinction I picked up about that capture list – we can use that list of all those things that we ‘think’ we need to do to stimulate a higher level of thinking in relation to what we really want, why we want it, and then get strategic about doing the key things. All the other items on the list will go away or won’t matter as much.
When we make traditional to do lists they rarely get done because they are typically so long and we never have enough time. So what this approach from Tony does is to switch our mindset to first capture everything, and be totally fine knowing that we are not going to do it all but we need to later be able to decide which things are worth doing.
From a starting place of having an overwhelming list of action items, there’s a good chance you’ll actually be able trim down and translate these to just 4 key outcomes ie outcomes for my home, my kids, my business and my personal life.
By catagorising the monster capture list it brings stress levels down and increases focus.
Take your capture list and filter it with these questions and actions.
3 SIMPLE QUESTIONS FOLLOWED BY 3 SIMPLE ACTIONS
QUESTION 1: What do I really want? (rather than thinking about what do I have to do). What is the desired outcomes?
QUESTION 2: Why is this important to me? Why is it exciting and transformative?
QUESTION 3: What do I need to do? Now that I’m clear, what’s my massive action plan ie what do I need to do to achieve this?
Once you have answered the questions above you can now go back through your massive capture list with renewed clarity and complete the following actions:
ACTION #1: Star the ‘MUST’ items, ie the actions that are the 20% that will make 80% of the difference towards the end result.
ACTION #2: Establish the real time needed to get the result . Ask yourself what is the minimum amount of time to get these MUST items completed and figure out where to block out time to get these done or instruct others to do them/help you.
ACTION #3: Find the leverage – this might require a switch in our thinking but there will typically always be multiple ways to find leverage in getting to the end result. Tony talks about finding ways to work with others where they really understand your desired outcome and purpose. This will produce a very different result to simply delegating without that connection to the purpose.
“Tony reminds us that we are never going to grow when our time is taken up with activities that aren’t important. Activity without high levels of purpose is a drain on your fortune.”
What have you learned this week that you will be implementing to help your property business progress?