Episode 129: Are you optimizing or prioritizing?


Here's a question worth considering: when was the last time you optimized something you should have just cut?

Optimization is saving ten minutes in a meeting. Prioritization is asking whether the meeting needed to happen at all.

In this episode, I walk through six places, work and personal, where the situation was optimizing something that should have been prioritized instead.

Why it matters:

  • Most productivity advice makes the wrong things faster instead of asking whether they should happen at all
  • The relentless prioritization filter works on almost anything you're already trying to optimize
  • The research behind keeping meetings small is more specific than most people realize, and it's not really about time

What you'll learn:

  • How to tell an inbox rule from an actual fix for inbox overload
  • Why trimming a meeting's invite list changes decision quality, not just calendar space
  • The difference between an auto-blocked calendar hold and a real Design Day
  • What changed when I moved from managing my social media to leaving almost all of it

P.S. If you want to go deeper with your team, it's also in the pocket guide, The Right Things First: 74 small pages, about a 65-minute listen, because I left out the fluff and got straight to the point.

RaderCo - Health-Powered Productivity

Do the right things first. Twice a month I send one prioritization practice you can use that week, plus the Health-Powered Productivity podcast, the reading, and what I'm learning on the road.

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