I’m dazzled when I run across people who produce enormous amounts of work with seemingly little effort. This requires focus and attention, a challenge in our distraction-laden environments.

It also requires prioritization, because simply put, you can’t do it all.

How to prioritize? Think in terms of what is going to advance you most meaningfully to achieve your goals.

People get stuck when their inner perfectionist or procrastinator take over.

Procrastinators avoid doing tasks until the 11th hour, and then everyone around them suffers as they bolt to the finish line, frantically trying to do hours of work in half the time. If this sounds like you, the obvious advice is to stop procrastinating!

Perfectionists are more complex, because they fret about everything being done “right”. They fear delegating and descend into the “no one can do it better or faster than me” syndrome. When that happens, they often lose sight of how to effectively prioritize.

In their minds, everything is important, and as a result they are immobilized into overload.

If this happens to you, the bottom line is that you can’t do it all. Here are some tips to extract you from such paralysis.

+ Decide which task will move you towards its accomplishment.
+ Overcome your resistance and delegate items that aren’t in your greatest area of strength to those people who have space to help you (in other words, stay out of their way once you delegate).
+ Keep in mind that excellence is superior to perfection.

Remember the adage that perfection is enemy of good. Stay out of that trap and watch your results improve.

“Lack of direction, not lack of time, is the problem. We all have twenty-four hour days.”
– Zig Ziglar

Header image by Kaboompics/Pexels.