Sam's story: reclaiming focus

"The key is not to prioritise what's on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities." 

Ah, Stephen Covey got it right. If you don’t know what your priorities are, whatever’s on your calendar will be prioritised, which often means low-value meetings and other people’s urgencies. Not a great way to work if you want to be more productive and better at managing your time. 

This week, we’re looking at identifying your core work and eliminating the non-essential. 

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Script | 408

Hello, and welcome to episode 408 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. 

Something that came up in last weekend’s Ultimate Productivity Workshop was around identifying your core work. The work you are employed to do or what you do to put food on your table. 

In the past, this was easy to do. Job descriptions were simple, and job titles included things like salesperson, accountant, lawyer, administrator, receptionist, lifeguard, and office manager. It was very clear what your responsibilities were, and defining your core work was simple. 

Today, hmmm, something’s gone disastrously wrong. Now we have job titles such as Empathy Engineer (a software designer), Scrum Master (a project manager of sorts from the twenty-teens Agile trend) or Digital Overlord (a website or systems manager). These are unclear and ill-defined, and figuring out what these jobs entail is challenging, to say the least, but not impossible with some thought. 

Then there are jobs such as the “C” roles: CEO, CFO, COO, etc. These are notoriously difficult to define because they are intentionally vague and depend on the company’s size, its goals and often the state of the company when a person starts the role. 

When Tim Cook took over from Steve Jobs in 2011, he took over a company on the up. When Satya Nadalla took over Microsoft, Microsoft was struggling in the rapidly growing mobile market. Same job titles, but entirely different roles given the state each company was in when they took over.

In today’s episode, we’re looking at core work and, more importantly, how to define your role so you can pull out the tasks you need to do consistently to perform well and make it easier to prioritise the things important to you. 

So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. 

This week’s question comes from Chris. Chris asks, hi Carl, I am really struggling to define my core work. I am a sales manager in a medium-sized car dealership. I manage a team of 12 salespeople, and I report directly to the General Manager. The part I am struggling with is what my tasks should be each week. Could you help?

Hi Chris, thank you for your question. 

For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of core work, your core work is the work you are employed to do. It’s how you are evaluated and the reason you were employed.

The issue with core work is that over time, the scope of your work can expand to a point where you have so many competing priorities that it becomes practically impossible to decide what needs your attention. And that’s when backlogs of important work start to grow uncontrollably. 

This can be caused by our innate human need to please people, so we say “yes” to too many things without considering whether we have the time to do the work we ‘volunteered’ to do. 

The problem here is that once you have said yes to the work outside your core work, you own it. It is now your responsibility to get the job done. Do this too often, and the line between what you are responsible for and what you volunteered to do becomes blurred. 

A few years ago, I worked with a client who was a product manager in a pharmaceutical company. Her core work was to ensure that her product’s labelling, literature, and local branding were accurate and up to date. She was also responsible for three sales campaigns each year. 

Unfortunately, Sam was a people pleaser. She couldn’t say no to anyone. She volunteered to be on the Annual kick-off event committee (each year the company had an off-site retreat to motivate the team for the new year), she volunteered to be the lead of a breast cancer awareness campaign her company wanted to run, and if a sales manager asked her to do a presentation to their sales people, she’d always say yes. 

But her people pleasing was not confined to her professional life. She volunteered to help organise events at her church, committed to watching her husband play football every weekend and would help her friends out at the drop of a hat. 

When I began working with Sam, she was a mess. Her weight had ballooned because she had no time for any physical movement or to watch what she ate; she wasn’t able to sleep properly, and she was suffering quite badly from eczema, brought on by stress and a lack of sleep. 

The first thing I did was get Sam to write down her original core work. I remember her having to pull out her job description to remind her what that was. 

When she looked at it, she began to cry. She confessed that what she did at work was nothing like what was written on those sheets of paper. 

So that’s where we started. 

I also got her to talk to her boss about stepping down from all the volunteer roles she’d accepted so she could focus on the work she was employed to do. 

Her boss was brilliant. She helped Sam remove herself from the volunteer roles so she could focus on what mattered. 

Within six months, Sam’s product was the top-selling product in the company. She’d lost 20 pounds in weight, she was sleeping well, and her eczema had all but disappeared. 

She was focused on what mattered and did that brilliantly. So much so that she was promoted after a further year. 

I tell that story because it demonstrates why defining your core work is so important. If you are not clear about what you are employed to do, in an effort to look busy and not upset anyone, you will keep accepting more and more roles outside the scope of the job you were employed to do. 

This does not mean that you should never accept voluntary roles or help out your colleagues from time to time. It means you should never lose sight of what you are employed to do. And to do that, you first need to identify what it is, then take it to the next level. 

That level identifies what doing your core work looks like at the task level. In other words, what do you actually do to perform your core work?

So, returning to your role, Chris, as a sales manager, a part of your role will be to support your sales team. What does that look like at a doing level?

Does that mean you need to schedule weekly one-to-ones with your team? Maybe you are also responsible for ensuring that the sales data is correct and up to date. 

Scheduling weekly one-to-ones is relatively straightforward. You may choose to dedicate a day to doing this, so your focus is on supporting your team and, in doing so, removing a weekly decision. 

For example, if you choose to hold your meetings on Mondays, you can block your calendar on those days and get them all done in one day. 

Maintaining your sales admin may involve 30 minutes a day of updating your company’s internal reporting system. If so, when will you do that? 

You may also be responsible for the training of your team. I know many managers are. If so, what does that involve, and what do you need to do personally to ensure it happens? 

So what you are doing is looking at the type of work you do and then asking yourself what that looks like at a doing level. 

Many medical doctors I speak with tell me their work is more than just seeing patients. Some of their additional roles include renewing prescriptions, completing insurance claims, and sorting out referrals to specialists. 

This means being a general practitioner is not as simple as walking into their clinic, going to their office and examining patients all day. They need to find time to do the additional work, which is often an extra 2 hours or more each day. 

Once you have identified your core work and pulled out what that looks like at the task level, the next step is to calculate how much time you will need to complete those tasks each week. 

In theory, this is easy. After all, if you have done something before, you should be able to figure out how long it will take you to do the same task in the future. 

Hahaha, not so easy. We are not machines, and some days we are not at our best. We might be tired, distracted or feeling ill. 

And those distractions may not even be of our own choosing. Other people interrupt you, ask you questions, or you are prevented from doing one of your critical tasks because a colleague has not given you the information you need. 

I remember talking with a gentleman who ran a car servicing business, and he told me that the biggest issue he had each day was something called “back orders”. This is where a part for a customer’s car was out of stock and on order. 

Nobody knew when the part would be back in stock, so they could not tell the customer when to bring their car in for the repair, or, worse, the customer could not come in to pick up their repaired car. 

In these situations, all you can do is work on the averages. 

I’ve been writing a weekly blog post of around 1,000 words each week for over ten years. You would have thought I would know how long writing a blog post would take by now, after doing it over 500 times. Not a chance. 

Some weeks it can take me forty minutes; other weeks, as much as two hours, to write the first draft. 

It’s the same for these podcasts. This week’s episode is number 408, which means I’ve written 407 scripts, and yet some weeks it takes two hours; others, four. And the worst thing is, I have no idea when I sit down to write the script how long it will take. 

In these situations, all you can do is work on averages. I allow two hours for writing these scripts. Most weeks, I can do it in that time; other weeks, I need to find additional time later in the week to finish them. 

Same with my blog posts. I have two hours each week protected for writing the posts. Most weeks, I finish well within that time; other weeks, I need the whole time. 

I’m working on averages, which ensures the bulk of what needs to be done gets done every week. 

And this brings us to the main reason for identifying your core work: 

Once you know what your core work is and what you need to do at a task level, you know how much time you need to protect for this work each week. That information alone will tell you how many meetings and voluntary work you can accept each week. 

Not knowing what your core work looks like at a task level risks putting yourself in Sam’s shoes. And if Sam were here with me, I know she’d be telling you never to let that happen to you. It destroys your health and leaves you feeling rotten every day. 

There you go, Chris. Thank you for your question, and thank you to all of you who attended the Ultimate Productivity Workshop over the last two weeks. It’s always a joy to help you, and it helps me see where you are struggling with productivity and time management. 

Thank you for listening, and it’s time for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.