Avoid This Common Trap in Time Management for Leaders: Efficiently Prioritize Tasks in the Workplace
For business owners, the temptation to continually add more tasks, projects, and goals to our schedules is overwhelming. This approach, known as the “Christmas Tree Effect,” suggests that simply piling on more will lead to greater achievements and success. However, this mindset often results in inefficiency, missed deadlines, and heightened frustration. In both our personal and professional lives, we struggle to balance the infinite capacity of our imagination with the finite nature of time. In this article, we’ll dive into the Christmas Tree Effect, exploring why “subtraction” is often the answer for higher workplace productivity. You’ll also learn some practical strategies like the Eisenhower Matrix and the Time Audit to help fine-tune your time management as a leader and uncover the key to maintaining focus in your small business.
Table of contents:
Understanding the Christmas Tree Effect
The Impact on Teams and Business Outcomes
A Best Practice Tool For Your Team’s Time Management
The Importance of Subtraction
The Time (Or Calendar) Audit
Productivity Tips For Leaders to Combat Inefficient Use of Time
Understanding the Christmas Tree Effect
The Christmas Tree effect is when you just keep adding and adding, believing that doing so is the way to get more done. I see it both in the way people do strategy and in the way people manage their weeks to execute that strategy. It is an important concept to be aware of in the realm of time management for leaders.
What is the problem with adding more? The human ability to imagine is infinite, time is finite. This discrepancy leads to a constant struggle to fit more into our schedules than is realistically possible. Initially, when learning something new, it takes longer to accomplish. As you get better, you can do the same tasks in less time, which gives you more time to add new tasks. However, there’s always a limit to how much you can add before your efficiency starts to suffer. You’re always walking the balance of how much you can add while still executing at a high level.
The Impact on Teams and Business Outcomes
In a team setting, the Christmas Tree Effect can be particularly detrimental. The attempt to get eight projects done means that you don’t get any of them done. You’ll see deadlines missed, people with longer checklists than they can accomplish, and longer hours with less productivity.
It really benefits a team to get incisive about what matters most, so they can keep the main thing the main thing. It also ensures that when they have a conflict of time, they know where that time should go.
For example, if your business is launching a new service, it needs to be the top priority. Why? Because it moves the needle. So, the priority switches to this new service release. The urgent but less important tasks, like fighting fires and distractions from other departments, should not be pushing the service launch down the list.
A Best Practice Tool For Your Teams Time Management
The Eisenhower Matrix, also known as the Covey Four-Square is a classic time management tool for leaders to implement with their teams. It helps prioritize tasks in the workplace based on their urgency and importance. High performers often find themselves firefighting—handling urgent but not necessarily important tasks—at the expense of deep, needle-moving work. Recognizing this tendency is crucial for maintaining focus on what truly matters.
The Importance of Subtraction
The great strategic teams start with subtraction before they go to addition. They identify, ‘What can we get rid of? What is no longer important? What are we doing that no longer has value?’ They spend a lot of time on that framework.
By applying subtraction to your calendar, you can create space for high-priority tasks and ensure that your schedule reflects your most important goals. One of the best frameworks you can use for this is the Time Audit. It is not a fun tool, but I do it with almost every senior leader I work with.
The Time (Or Calendar) Audit
For a period of four weeks, keep a notebook beside you. Every time you change tasks, write down the time and the task you changed to. This act in itself works as a forcing function; you won’t want to write in that book very much, so you’ll stop task changing as often.
A Note of Caution: The Hawthorne Effect is a classic productivity study that states that a change in your environment will force you to be more alert, which will drive greater performance. Basically, it’s a fake result. You need to be really careful to take the first two weeks of results in anything you’re doing and consider this effect.
The time audit not only reduces task switching but also provides a clear picture of where your time is actually spent. With the leaders we’ve worked with, no one has been more than 37% accurate on where they think they spend their time.
There’s a couple of things that happen to pull leaders away from where they should be spending their minutes:
The higher up they are in an organization, the more they are leaned on for decisions, advice, mentorship, and more. It’s natural for leaders to gravitate to that stuff.
When we get tired, which by the way is very quick in the day, we default to what we know how to do best or what we like to do. Not what we need to do.
The compounding impact of how many times you get swayed right instead of left will amaze you.
Productivity Tips For Leaders to Combat Inefficient Use of Time
There are a myriad of frameworks out there to help you keep on track and manage your time. I love to bake in the day to day to the big picture. I’ve got a whole set of models that I go through every quarter to get anchored into a run rate. I then carry a little field notes book with me and follow the Ivy Lee method of productivity.
The Ivy Lee Method:
What are the top six things you are doing today (No more than six)? Rank them in order of most to least important and don’t move onto the next task until you’ve completed the one before.
The “Delegate List”
The Delegate List is for tasks that needs to get done, but you can’t or shouldn’t be doing it yourself. Maybe you get your assistant to do it, or someone on your team. This seems obvious, but it is important for you to keep an actual list so you are aware of it, have it as a reminder to check in, and can check it off once it is done.
The “Someday-Maybe” List
Your someday maybe list is for tasks that you might do eventually, or might not. The list is a safe place for every idea you’ve generated that might have some value in the future without having to start them now. In most cases, if you don’t start something, it doesn’t happen. That’s why so many projects get started in bigger organizations that have the budget for it. They continue to add and add and add until the Christmas tree gets really ugly. The someday maybe list helps mitigate this and prioritizes tasks in the workplace.
Conclusion
The Christmas Tree Effect serves as a poignant reminder that more is not always better, especially when it comes to managing tasks and schedules in a small business. The constant addition of tasks, projects, and goals without proper prioritization and focus compounds negatively against your business.
To combat this, it's crucial to implement strategies like the Eisenhower Matrix and the Time Audit to maintain a clear focus on what truly matters. By categorizing tasks based on urgency and importance, and meticulously tracking how time is spent, business leaders can identify and eliminate low-value activities, thereby improving overall workplace productivity. If you’re looking to prioritize tasks in the workplace, these strategies are a great start for ensuring proper time management for leaders.