Slaying The Vampire: How to Shuffle Through Your Mental RAM to Move Your Mission Forward
“It takes more time than you are giving it and less time than you fear.”
I think I picked up that phrase or some version of it from David Allen (of Getting Things Done Fame). Regardless of where it comes from, there is truth in it. There are things in our organizational and operational life we put off – emails in our inbox that we feel guilt over not yet having responded to, yet we still haven’t done it; tasks that we know we need to do, but dread what it might mean; blogs we need to write, but haven’t yet started… You get the point.
The importance of this statement is that oftentimes we avoid important (and not urgent) work because we are afraid of the time and mental drain that we think it might take. However, I wonder if the mental RAM we give up by not doing it and having it weigh on our minds is actually a greater cost?
These are called Vampire Tasks, and you can slay them.
They suck up mental RAM and drain the life out of your work. So, what is the best antidote to overcome this mental drain?
3 Tips to help you keep moving forward and Slay The Vampire:
Timebox them. Block off an hour to work on that task you have been putting off.
Bake it into your regular workflow. If it’s an ongoing thing, schedule a regular meeting to do the work.
Do the next actionable step. Sometimes we are overwhelmed by the size of a project. As the saying goes, the best way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time. So the key is to not get overwhelmed by the size of the project, but to determine – what is the next step I can do to do make progress?
These are just three simple things you can do to keep those pesky vampire tasks from draining your energy – and start making progress to move your mission forward.