How to eliminate busywork from your day

There are three basic types of work we complete every day:

Bad work

Time-sucking, life-sapping bureaucratic tasks that keep growing like weeds through the cracks of your working life.

Good work

Useful work that makes up most of your working day. It’s important and productive It’s getting things done. It’s familiar and comfortable. For an organization, good work is the reliable engine of profit.

Great work

Work that challenges and inspires us. This work has meaning and makes a difference. This is the creative, strategic, differentiating work that we hoped we were signing up for when we began a job. It contains both reward and risk.

Think you need to eliminate bad work to get more great work done? Wrong. It’s actually the good work that eats up the majority of our time because it’s comfortable and familiar. There are three ways to nix busywork. See a snippet below:

• Embrace adequate. Excellence is highly overrated. Perfectionism can be debilatating. It’s okay to strive for great standards of success, but embracing ‘just satisfactory’ work in some cases is a crucial asset.

Read more about all three at Open Forum.

Posted via email from Anthony's Posterous