In the 1960s, expert testimony was given to a Senate subcommittee that, because of the advances of technology, within 20 years from then, America would have to radically change the way it does business. Employees would have to work only 22 hours a week and come to work only 32 weeks a year. Because of technological efficiency, people would be forced to retire at the age of 40. Amazingly, just the opposite is true. We’re working harder and longer. Every year average vacation time shrinks as the retirement age grows.

“Everything you do requires your time,” wrote Peter Drucker over 40 years ago, rereleased in 2006 as The Effective Executive in Action. “This means that your accomplishments and your effectiveness are set, or limited, by the way you manage your time, your scarcest resource. Unless you manage your time, you will not be able to manage anything else. The management of your time, therefore, is the foundation for your effectiveness.” (Drucker, 2006, page 11)

This fact is compounded with the technological advances that have occurred in the last decade. Fiber optics, digitization, broadband communications, instant messaging, and the like have multiplied our things to do exponentially. Returning from a typical week out of the office, today’s executive has hundreds of e-mails to reply to, scores of voice mail messages to answer, and a series of appointments in her calendar made electronically without her consent. That’s why a traditional approach to time management fails us. Traditional time management says, “Do you have 10 things to do today? I can show you how to do 15. Do you have 15 things to do today? I can show you how to do 20.” But the stark reality of business today is that we have 30, 40, and even 50 things to do every single day that simply cannot be done through greater efficiencies.

Triage is a perfect metaphor for this filtering process. When medical personnel arrive at a disaster scene, they don’t start helping the first person whose path they cross, and then the next person, and the next. A system is established that sorts through the injured and sets an order of priority of who should receive help first. That is what the word triage actually means, sorting.

When we take our task list and start at the top working our way down—or start every day answering e-mail—we are not applying triage to time. There is no list that can tell us the best use of our energy, which tasks are best aligned with our talent, and which will have the greatest impact in the marketplace. Only focus can do that. And only focus will help us make the decisions that are needed to live a life based on importance and not urgency. Again, Peter Drucker counsels, “Concentration—that is, the courage to impose what really matters most and comes first—is the executive’s only hope of mastering time and events instead of being their whipping boy.” (Drucker, 2006, page 142)

My friend explained to me that his pool is equipped with a regulator that adds water to it every day. In the Phoenix summertime, water evaporates from a pool that size at a rate of 5 to 10 gallons every 24 hours. In very short order, without a refill filter in the blistering desert heat, the pool would be empty. The heat of leadership does the same thing. It drains us dry. Every week we must attend to the priority of our physical, mental, and emotional health. Ignore this at your peril.

A second priority almost all of my clients identify is family. I remember being at work when the tragedy of 9/11 unfolded and there was only one place I wanted to be, back home with my wife and children. The sentiment was nationwide as Americans sat transfixed in their living room with the ones they loved watching the drama unfold, hurting and healing together. It shouldn’t take a tragedy, though, to alert us to this very important priority. Whatever form your family takes, even a community of friends, attend to it every week.

The remaining priorities are reserved for work and community service. Most of my clients break down their work into three or four key areas. Tom, a busy manager, breaks his work up into these four crucial components:

List these on the left column, as Tom has, on the worksheet on the following page.

Some of the top priority steps of action I list on my Weekly Planning Worksheet are recurring tasks, but many times ideas have come to me in my morning planning sessions that I had never thought of before and are the perfect solution to a pressing concern. I’ve planned trips with my kids, and employee rewards, marketing campaigns, and coaching innovations. Bottom line: The half hour I spend reviewing my top priorities and planning steps of action for the week is the most important discipline in my life. It drives everything I do and keeps me consistently on track with what matters most to me.

To the right of the priorities you listed on the Weekly Planning Worksheet, write out the steps of action you plan to take this week to fulfill each priority. This is not everything you will do in the week, just the most important things. Your list should not exceed 10, roughly one or two items for each priority area.

As Stephen Covey aptly points out, if you have to fill a five-gallon bucket with both sand and rocks, what do you put in first? If you put the sand in first, the rocks won’t fit. But if you put the rocks in first, the sand will find its way around the rocks and fill the bucket. Your top priorities are your rocks. Place them in your calendar for the week first. The rest of the activities you do, your sand, will “magically” find a way to fit around them.

I just returned from a two-week mission trip with my 13-year-old daughter. It was an idea that came to me in one of my Sunday morning planning sessions. I have a busy coaching and speaking schedule, but showing my teenage daughter how two thirds of the world lives is a high priority to me. Months in advance we put this rock in my schedule, and the most incredible thing happened: Everything else began to fit around it. In fact, when my clients heard what I was doing, they applauded my efforts and bent over backward to accommodate me. Sitting in the dirt of a migrant farmworkers’ camp eating hot dogs and beans with my teenage daughter is the fondest memory I have of the trip, and it happened solely because of this five-step system of living by priority.

I use the A, B, C, D, E method for sifting through my things to do. An A task is a top priority that needs to be done today. A B task is a normal priority that needs to be done this week. A C task is a low priority that has a deadline within the month. The letter D, however, stands for a very important word: Delegate. Go through your ABCs and ask yourself who else can do these things? Anything that can be done by someone else should not be done by you. Your time is too limited.

The final letter is E and stands for Eliminate—in other words, simply choosing to not do some things. Peter Drucker refers to this as abandonment and regards it as a crucial component to time mastery. “I have yet to see an executive, regardless of rank or station,” he boldly writes in The Effective Executive in Action, “who could not consign a quarter of the demands on his time to the wastepaper basket without anybody’s noticing their disappearance.” (Drucker, 2006, page 17)

By this time you are back at the beginning of the week. Review your worksheet and see which top priority steps of action were completed. Which were not? Why? Reassess, reschedule, and reload for another week lived in tune with what matters most to you.

It takes courage to apply this kind of focus to an organization. It means making hard choices to focus on the few and not the many. There is comfort in doing many things. We think that by doing them we’ll have all our bases covered and rest in the routine of well-worn practices. But the cost of this approach is high. Market leaders without exception focus on a vital few priorities, not the many but the few, and execute them flawlessly.

This choice also means that we must leave some things undone. That, too, requires courage because every activity has its fans, some of them rabid. Fear of offending a vocal constituency often keeps us from doing what is right for the health of our organization. I once owned some property that had grapevines on it. Year after year I had the most beautiful vines with long branches, big leaves, and no grapes. I learned for a grapevine to produce fruit it needs to be pruned, rigorously pruned. The same is true for the organizations we serve.

The runaway business best seller, Good to Great, examines how 11 companies transformed themselves from being average performers to delivering spectacular results sustained over a period of 15 years. One key to this transformation was consistent pruning of the corporate vine. Jim Collins writes,

What’s on your stop-doing list?