When I was in 5th grade I remember a classmate telling me how excited he was that the teacher was cutting everyone’s lowest quiz score. I got excited because my lowest score was…. low, but I was entirely confused that he was dropping his lowest score, a 92%. To me that was a great grade, so why would he want to not keep it?

Now despite my younger-selfs math-related challenges I find the approach of dropping the things that are holding us back very beneficial. Not only do we better understand what we are doing every day, but we can also hone our skills and improve our outcomes. I’m not suggesting we simply stop answering tickets, or stop doing chores, but I am suggesting that can find creative ways to get rid of the work that holds us back from becoming something greater.

What’s holding you back?

The first step is to figure out what, specifically, is keeping you stuck. This might be having to run a specific report, or manage a specific system, or deal with specific client group. I find it helpful to go through my calendar and emails and see what I would procrastinate on, or what I have a poor knee-jerk reaction to. That meeting on Tuesday mornings with auditors that I always dread? That one email from accounting I keep snoozing? Both great examples of things that maybe I could find a way to drop.

Just write down anything that falls into that bucket (I’m focusing mainly on work, but this can apply to anything), and, ideally, a quick reason WHY you’re putting it on The List. You don’t have to make The List all at once (I keep a rolling one going), so don’t feel like you need to cram in everything. The List may also change as time goes on. Maybe the guy in Accounting you don’t like working with leaves, or maybe you’re given the opportunity to improve the report that you hate running. Don’t think of this as being set-in-stone, but rather something that grows and changes with you.

Our example list:

Now What?

Once your List is up and running make time to better understand what about each item makes you want to cut it. This could be a one word reminder, or a longer description of why it’s holding you back, but the intention is to better understand both why and how its holding you back. In my math example it would be “A 92 is my lowest score, and it’s lowering my overall grade”. For running a report it might be “The audit report can be run by anyone and it takes 3 hours every week”. Understanding your knee-jerk response to the item will help you better understand what you can do to get rid of it later.

Unless we get REALLY lucky it’s unlikely you’ll be able to get rid of everything on The List, so after you understand WHY it’s bugging you, stack rank everything. I find it helpful to quantify things a big with the following dimensions, both are on a subjective 1-5 scale of 1 being low and 5 being high.

• Frequency - How frequently does this thing come up? Is it a standing weekly meeting, or only once a year?

• Annoyance - How much does this item bug me? Will I complain about it to my spouse daily, or only gripe about it to myself once in a while?

This makes it a bit easier to more “objectively” (in quotes since the scales are entirely subjective) determine which item should be jettisoned before others. Once I’ve rated everything I just add the scores together and look for the highest number.

Our updated list:

And Then?….

Now comes the tricky part. We’ve done the work of figuring out what we want to get rid of, and in what order… now we have to actually get rid of it. Exactly how this happens depends a lot on your environment, what is available at the time and your company’s culture. Some of my favorites:

Shift the work to a more junior co-worker

“One man’s trash is another man’s treasure”. This can hold true for work as well. Many times a task that I find boring or mundane is something a more junior co-worker will jump on. Instead of being an onerous task I have to deal with, it morphs into a coaching opportunity that helps upskill my team. This is beneficial to me, since I both get rid of the task, beneficial to my teammate who gets exposure to something new, and beneficial to the greater team since skills are being improved overall.

Automate the task

While this doesn’t work in all cases (e.g. meetings), this is one of my favorites. Many tasks, especially those in a tech environment, can be automated away. In addition to getting rid of the work, I find this a fun technical exercise, almost like a mini-project. In the past I’ve done things like automating reports, auto-forwarded emails, written google scripts to automate badging into classes, and tapped into APIs to grab workday data. Any given solution will be unique (which is half the fun), but I really enjoy this approach since I both get to remove work from my plate, and explore new methods of automating stuff.

Delete the work

In some (usually rare) cases, the task can simply be deleted. I’ve found this to be true with some reports, especially ones that are more historic, as well as some access-related tasks (simply stop sending it or remove access and see what happens). You need to be careful with this particular approach, however, since the thing you delete might actually be needed. To help curb this instead of outright deleting something I tend to disable or hide it for a while. If no one notices after a month or two I’ll straight up remove it.

I was told there would be no math

While this exercise does take time, it is incredibly helpful, even if you can’t actually get rid of anything immediately. A better understanding of what you want to get rid of will help you start to find ways of improving. You’ll also get a list of things you can talk to your team or manager about, which may lead to some interesting solutions (maybe other folks have the same things on their List, or have creative ways of dealing with it). It helps me to remember that when I’m looking over what I do. At the very least I’ll get a better understanding of my work, at best I’ll be able to better focus on what is really important.