Mission accomplished?

Perhaps you busy yourself with responding to email, responding to voice mail or helping other people with their urgent priorities. You can get busy cleaning your office, organizing your desk or setting up a sophisticated filing system to corral the electronic flotsam and jetsam entering your world. Doing these things can give you a feeling of accomplishment, too (especially if you make a list and cross them off as you complete them). But you can complete all sorts of tasks and still not get anything done.

If you really want to get things done, you have to be willing to trade in the activities that don’t move you any closer to your goals for the ones that do. You have to swap email and voice mail duties for a higher-value task, such as developing new relationships or nurturing existing ones. You have to swap cleaning your office and organizing your desk for finding ways to better serve your clients. You have to swap low-value work for real work that produces real results.

The problem is that the important work you really need to do is more difficult. You have to overcome your resistance to it. This is the work you are trying to avoid when you spend your time scratching low-value tasks off your list.