I was just reading Michael Hyatt’s book Free to Focus this past week. And it’s pretty awesome, BTW so I thought I’d share. He talks about this concept of how the tasks we work on fall within 4 zones: the Desire Zone, Drudgery Zone, Distraction Zone, and Disinterest Zone. The bottom line: you want to be working in your Desire Zone, which is basically right at the intersection of Passion and Proficiency… (what you’re both passionate about and proficient at).

During a capture I was working on recently, this concept inspired me to take something off my plate that I was neither passionate about nor proficient at. I handed this mini project over to someone I knew I could trust. And I knew she could do it well. It also freed up my time to focus on things that were far more important like — figuring out who my REAL competition was, figuring out what my price-to-win needed to be, and working with my solution team to make our solution rock-solid to the REAL proposal evaluators.

I bet you have a task you could take off your plate and delegate to someone else right now. And I bet everyone else on your team does as well… I mean come on now, would you rather have your proposal manager ordering lunch for the team? Or would you rather have them figuring out how to architect the page perfectly to fit everything you need on it in order to be compelling in the allotted page count that you have? Couldn’t you have a coordinator order the lunches so they could free up more of their time to do that?

I am a productivity junkie. So all last year and even now, I religiously use this planner called the Productivity Planner, which I talked about in this blog. But now I’ve just ordered the new Full Focus Planner by Michael Hyatt, the same guy who wrote the book. So I’m going to try it out. I’ll let you know which planner ends up winning out.

To me it’s important to clearly understand my vision, goals, and strategy and have some sort of system in place to make sure I can get everything done. What are your thoughts?

I wanted to quickly get a pulse from you – what are the things you’d like help getting off your plate? And what would you focus on if you had more freedom to do so? Please shoot me an email back with your response. It will help me create better content for you in the future.