👉 Every notification on your messaging app, every email in your inbox, is someone else asking you to work on their priority.
The best way to move your agenda / priority forward is to schedule every minute of your day at the beginning of each day. Before you open your mailbox or messaging app.
1) Spend the first 30 mins of each work-day blocking slots for the most important actions that will move your biggest priority forward, that will most positively impact your most important goals (both organisational & personal).
2) Anything that doesn’t fit gets deleted, delegated (or ‘snoozed’ but with a clear deadline. This snoozing is for lower priority items, that too after a clear discussion with relevant stakeholders).
3) How to choose the most important priorities? Pick the highest leverage ones, i.e. those that will make other important priorities easier or redundant.
4) Once the calendar is set, ruthlessly follow the calendar. Everything else can wait.
p.s. Scheduling every minute doesn’t mean you don’t have time to relax or you don’t have flexibility. You can block time to refresh or disconnect. The blocks can move around and can expand or contract as needed. But that starting point of having a fully blocked day will force you to ‘put big rocks first’ and automatically say no to a bunch of unimportant time wasting activities.