It is difficult to advance your leadership at work when you are still doing everything at home. We often bulge our to-do list with tasks that are unachievable within 24 hours. It’s important to let go of some things so that we can do what really matters. Tiffany Dufu came up with an epiphany titled “Drop the Ball”.
Tiffany is Founder and CEO of The Cru, a peer coaching platform for women looking to accelerate their professional and personal growth. She was a launch team member to Lean In and was Chief Leadership Officer at Levo, one of the fastest-growing millennial professional networks.
Tiffany Dufu is a catalyst-at-large in the world of women’s leadership and the author of Drop the Ball: Achieving More By Doing Less, a memoir and manifesto that shows women how to cultivate the single skill they really need in order to thrive: the ability to let go. This book helps you figure out which work and family tasks you REALLY need to do—and which you should stop doing.
Here are the three tips by Tiffany Dufu that will help you do what matters instead of doing it all. Read on.
Admit that your current to-do list is unrealistic
Write down the tasks that you expect to complete in an ideal and estimate the amount of time that it will take to complete each task on the list. When you sum up the time, you would discover that it is more than the hours we have in a day. We dont usually add the time to rejuvenate on our to-do list. Ensure to do this time assessment, so that you can see this from yourself.
Focus on your highest and best use
We often end up with a lot of things on our to-do list because we can things better and faster than others. Just because you can do something faster and better does not mean it is the most efficient use of your time for it to be on your list. Getting clear about your highest and best use is one of the most important steps to dropping the ball and prioritizing your to-do list. Check your to-do list and take note of the things that you do with very little effort and also tick off things that only you can do. These things are the highest and best use.
Practice patience judo
Once you have gotten clear about your highest and best use, you have to let something go and delegate the rest to others. We grow impatient when the things on our to-do list are not done the way we feel they should be done. Dropping the ball requires letting go of some control to allow other people to assume responsibility. Practice patience judo!
We hope that these three tips will help you to focus on the most important tasks, be more productive and help in advancing your leadership at work.
This blog is an excerpt from Tiffany Dufu’s video on Lean In.
