Prioritising performance

There’s something about the idea of prioritisation that doesn’t feel quite right, isn’t there? Ask any high performer and they’ll no doubt tell you the idea of doing less feels counter-intuitive. But irrational as it may seem, the research tells us that it is one of the fastest routes to results. 

In his book, Great at Work, Berkeley Professor, Morten Hansen, argues that those who ‘do less, then obsess’ (over those carefully chosen priorities) are some of our top performers. He found that, not only do they consistently outperform those who ‘do more’, but they also achieve more than those who take on more and work hard at all of them. 

Over five years, Hansen studied 5000 employees across different organisations. His research showed that people who focus on fewer priorities perform in the 82nd performance percentile, whereas those who do more things to the point of stress only perform in the 54th percentile – only one point ahead of those people who do less without much determination. The ‘do less, then obsess’ crew also boosted their work life balance by 26 percentage points. 

So what does this mean we should do? Our top tips: 

• Take time to review everything that has taken up your time at work over the last few weeks. Sort it into two lists - the things that have fed into your - and your team’s - goals and purpose, and those that haven’t.

• Review the things that haven’t and ask: do these really need to be done? 

• If not, discuss them with your manager; what would it take to let them go? 

• If yes, consider if you can redesign them so they take less effort. Can they be done more efficiently? Less comprehensively? By someone else? 

Let us know how you get on.