Dr. Cal Newport

Because now, even if you can't get away, you have to say yes to these things because it's the way your organization works.

The stuff that's in the waiting to work on queue, you say, I don't have meetings about that.

I don't do emails about that.

I wait till I'm actively working on it.

And I only actually work on three things at a time.

Now, I'm going to finish those things really quickly.

Because I don't have 15 items worth of meetings I'm going to every day.

So things are going to pull up there pretty quickly.

And so the rate at which I'm accomplishing things will probably be higher than it was before.

But I only work on three things actively.

You could even make this visible.

It's in a shared document if you want to.

When someone asks you to do something new, tell them to put it on the end of your queue.

You're like, oh, okay.

So like Andrew is not working on this right now.

He's working on these three things and there's seven things here and I'm adding something number eight.

So I know not to expect something for a while.

In fact, I can keep checking this list until I see Andrew's working on it so I can see it's making progress.

And then once I know he's working on it, I can start email him about it and we can do just the normal type of overhead you would have with projects, right?

That alone is going to have a huge difference.