In a recent Circle learning opportunity about identifying low valued tasks and what to do with them, we learned that research shows that knowledge workers spend 41% of their time on low-value—and often tedious—tasks that could be handled by others. Harvard Business Review's article on this was the basis for our conversation: Make Time for Work That Matters
That is why when I saw Seth Godin's blog post about what we do all day - I thought it was another fitting set of filters to consider about where we spend our time.
Fun, urgent or fear-based
Most of what we do at work all day is one of these three.
Fun: It's engaging, it gives us satisfaction, people smile.
Urgent: Someone else (or perhaps we) decided that this paper is on fire and it has to be extinguished before anything else happens.
Fear-based: Most common of all, the things we do to protect ourselves from the fear we'd have to sit with if we didn't do them.
Not on this list: important.
A day spent doing important work is rare indeed. Precious, too.