Pressure versus important

# Chapter 156

There are so many things you feel pressure to work on, but only a few which are really important. Digging down to those important ones is your task every day. It is where you will receive the largest payoff and you will thank me later. Knowing what is the primary lever of your success is not always an easy thing to discern, but like most of us, there is a 20% of actions and decisions and focus that will produce 80% of the results that you are seeking. The other 80% of what you do, is the part that threatens to overwhelm all the important stuff every day and it is your duty and responsibility to reel those in every day.

These that need to be reeled in are likely the noisy squeaky incessant parts of your job, the dings, bells and whistles of your computer telling you that you have another email or slack message or iMessage or WhatsApp notification and etc etc. Its happening to me as I sit here and write these words down on this page. It was happening before I began writing this chapter, I was getting sucked down into the email rabbit hole and I had to pull out quickly and decide that every single one of those unread and unanswered emails could wait until I got the difficult and important 275 written today. Your situation won’t be precisely like mine, but it will be similar enough to feel very eerily the same. Nor do I have to be the one that resolves all the noisy squeaky incessant parts that keep showing up in the course of the day. Others can do much of that, and often it can just be ignored if you have strength of character to ignore them.