Goals over Tools

It’s frequent to see friends and colleagues overwhelmed by how much there is to do everyday.

A common advice you will hear is that you should spend some time thinking on how to manage your time, and learn to manage it better. Easy, right? It’s not easy. It seems that our brains are wired for things that require immediate attention, and shy from more abstract matters. But it needs to be done.

Do you need a to-do list? Not necessarily. In an 2006 interview with CNN’s Money about how he works, Bill Gates said he is not big on to-do lists. And he gets an awful lot of work done. What you need is to device a system that works for you. Try a methodology and tweak it until it works for you.

The goal is not to become proficient at managing your to-dos list or keeping your email inbox tamed. Efficiency, personal productivity, time management… are not the goals, but tools. The goal is to do what’s important over what is urgent, to do quality work instead of just a lot of work. Get to the point where you can focus in doing what’s important for you.