Getting stuff not done

This post comes from a comment I made over at erica.biz.

Eliminating tasks that don’t need to be done is the hardest thing for me.

Couple of ways to do this:

1. Overcommit yourself. What doesn’t need to get done won’t get done. The key to this is to NOT go into crisis management mode… easier said than done, but it’s a main technique of mine, and my life is fairly low stress (albeit busy as ‘ell).

2. For any particular task, ask yourself WHY it needs to done. If there isn’t a bottom line return (or CYA if necessary), then it can get pushed back in the stack. This is much harder for me to do than overcommitting… partly due to rewiring myself from a pure research mode where serendipity is often found in “low value” activities, and partly because I am not sure why some things need to be done, other than I just “feel” such tasks ought to be done.

I suspect that as I become more successful, I’ll eventually go full circle from puttering around exploring interesting and potentially profitable ideas, to ruthlessly focused on building a scalable operation, then back to puttering as the business starts to run itself. There is value in “low-value” activities, a subject for another article.

How to do you eliminate what doesn’t need to be done?

[Update: November 3, 2008]

Turns out Peter Drucker was a proponent of getting things not done, by simply abandoning them. John D. Cook makes a note of this here.