Getting Rid of Activities that Stifle You

Via the 37signals blog, we learn that management guru Jim Collins recommends that we have a “stop doing” list.

Collins recommends that we answer the following questions:

• What am I deeply passionate about?
• What am I genetically encoded for — what activities do I feel just “made to do”?
• What makes economic sense — what can I make a living at?

He then says that when we find ourselves spending more than 50% of our time on activities not related to these questions, then we should consider stopping those activities.

While I periodically cull my task list, eliminating tasks I no longer want to do, I have not systematically eliminated “stifling” activities. For example, although I have trimmed the number of blogs I subscribe to from over 200 to 58, there are still too many feeds that do not consistently provide useful content to me. I spend a fair amount of time every day reading through the headlines from these feeds, and generally at the end of the day I am wondering “what did I really get out of that?” More often than not, the answer is “nothing.”

I do want to stay in touch with what’s going on, but I am convinced there has to be a better way to do it. A person should not have to “be connected all day” to get an adequate amount of information. I am reminded of how news was handled when I was growing up: the evening news (the world news) lasted 15 minutes. (See the recent article on my lifestream blog, criticizing TechCrunch’s article on “Twitter being the new Walter Cronkite”.) There was no 24-hour news channel, and there was not enough real news to last more than 15 minutes, even though I grew up in the height of the cold war. My view is that there is not now enough real news to last more than 15 minutes, if you leave out the nonsense stuff, like Tiger Woods’ indiscretion (why is that considered news?).

Anyway, my current way of gathering information is too consuming, taking time that could be better spent, and I need to find a different way to do it. So, that is one example of what Mr. Collins is talking about.

I think Collins makes a lot of sense and has some wisdom for us all to consider.

Thoughts?