FINAL THOUGHTS FROM SYENNA

Hi readers,

I hope you enjoyed a relaxing festive break regardless of whether you celebrate Christmas or the western New Year. If you are anything like me, the onslaught of emails awaiting my arrival at the start of the year was enough to send me back to 2022. Now that things have settled down a bit, I thought it would be good to focus my energy on principles and approaches to help me work smarter and not harder in 2023. Here are the five principles that I plan to follow as I embark on trying to make progress in the midst of chaos in my inbox and my to-do list.

1. Done is better than perfect

How many times do we spend hours procrastinating and dreading a task instead of just getting on with the first rough draft? Sometimes we place so much pressure on ourselves to produce a perfect final version the first time when the best thing we can do is get the first draft out of the way as soon as possible. This is a strategy used by many authors to get on with writing the book, sometimes writing the first draft of that proposal or important email in a stream-ofconsciousness setting and then reviewing the piece two to three times is the best way to tackle what may seem like an impossible task. In this way seeking progress over perfectionism is the key to tackling those gargantuan tasks.

2. Pareto Principle

We all seem to have never-ending to-do lists and who does not enjoy the feeling of clearing off things on that list however how many of those tasks are actually contributing to value to your work day? What is THE most important thing that you can focus on at this time? What if we allocated our time so that we spend 80% dedicated to the 20% of things on our to-do list that are yielding 80% of the value. It is less about the actual numbers in proportioning time versus value and more about taking on the mind-set of trying to figure out at any point in time what may contribute to bringing about the most value. A good way to assess this is by understanding what is urgent versus what is important and what is neither urgent nor important etc, see figure 1 illustrating the Eisenhower Matrix.