Focus and Ignore Lists

Good harvardbusiness.org post on Two Lists You Should Look at Every Morning:

Make two lists:

• List 1: Your Focus List (the road ahead).  What are you trying to achieve?  What makes you happy?  What's important to you?  Design your time around those things.  Because time is your one limited resource and no matter how hard you try you can't work 25/8.
• List 2: Your Ignore List (the distractions). To succeed in using your time wisely, you have to ask the equally important but often avoided complementary questions: what are you willing not to achieve?  What doesn't make you happy?  What's not important to you?  What gets in the way?

Some people already have the first list.  Very few have the second.

I definitely need to start making an ignore list. Whenever I catch myself in a time sink of questionable value, I’m going to enter it into my Focus & Ignore Lists entry in KeyNote.

What’s on your Focus List / Ignore List?