Achieving effectiveness through selectiveness

There’s a mantra from the workaholic recovery world that goes:

I am more effective by being more selective.The more I take my time, the more time I have to take.

These ideas may sound corny and counterintuitive, but I assure you they’re wildly effective. Because at the root of such sentiments is a sense of temporal abundance.

You trust that you have plenty of time to do everything you want to do. You believe you now receive full assistance and cooperation from all persons necessary for realizing your work vision. Time to spare and time to share.

Doctors and nurses know all about this mindset. In the medical world, they call it triaging. The assignment of degrees of urgency to wounds and illnesses to decide the order of treatment of a large number of patients. Triage originally derives from the fourteenth century term for picking or culling, but the word gained popularity during the first world war as a way to describe caring for injured soldiers.

And the good news about the idea is, you don’t have to work in an emergency room to benefit from the process. Triaging is, at its basic level, sorting and allocating care to maximize survival. We all do this for ourselves on a daily, if not hourly basis. After all, human beings parse through eleven million bits of data every second to focus on the appropriate order of treatment of tasks.

But while triaging is done automatically in many cases, there’s still a manual component to the process. Choreographing intention and attention is a real skill that pays dividends.

What’s your triaging process? How do you sort and allocate care to maximize survival?

You may not need to assign your tasks a color, number or degree of urgency to decide the order of treatment. Although if that helps, by all means do it. The larger goal here reinforcing your sense of temporal abundance.

Achieving effectiveness through selectiveness. Proving to yourself that you live by divine appointment with broad margins.

And that you are the source of time, not the victim of it.

Do you know when to do more in less time, and know when to do less in more time?