Ep 122: More Tasks Than Time to Complete
The Focus Funnel
SUMMARY
When you start producing systematically, you quickly discover just how much work it actually takes and you suddenly start to feel overwhelmed by an endless task list. Here's what happens to almost every creative professional I work with: they implement better systems and processes, set up project management tools, and then suddenly become completely overwhelmed—not because the systems aren't working, but because they're working too well, revealing everything they actually need to do for the first time, and the real problem isn't time shortage but decision shortage, because creative work naturally expands to fill available time and without boundaries, every opportunity becomes an obligation.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
⚡️ Decision Shortage Over Time Shortage: Most creatives don't have a time management problem—they have a decision-making problem. All tasks aren't equal, and energy matters more than time blocks.
⚡️ The 15-20% Rule: When using the Eisenhower Matrix, only 15-20% of your tasks should actually be urgent AND important. If more items fall here, you haven't been ruthless enough in your categorization.
⚡️ Strategic Elimination Builds Creative Focus: Regular practice of eliminate, automate, delegate, and strategic procrastination doesn't just manage tasks better—it reclaims your creative energy for work that truly matters.
NOTABLE QUOTES
💬 "Without boundaries, every opportunity becomes an obligation."
💬 "Most creatives don't have a time shortage problem. They have a decision shortage problem."
💬 "You're never going to have enough time for everything, but you can have enough time for the right things."
EPISODE RESOURCES
⚡️Focus Funnel Action Guide - Free download with step-by-step framework
⚡️ DO vs DUE Framework - Create margin for strategic work
⚡️ "The Four-Hour Workweek" by Tim Ferriss - Original focus funnel concept
⚡️ "Essentialism" by Greg McKeown - Master class in doing fewer things better
⚡️ Subscribe to my weekly newsletter here
TRANSCRIPT
When you start producing systematically, you quickly discover just how much work it actually takes and you suddenly start to feel overwhelmed by an endless task list. Today we're solving the I've got more tasks than time problem with a simple but powerful decision making framework that will help you transform how you approach your workload. Let's get into it.
Taking creatives from chaos to clarity. Welcome back to Creativity Made Easy, the podcast for creative professionals who want to scale their business with systems and processes that actually work. I'm your host, Dustin Pead, creative process coach and consultant, and I help creative professionals know themselves, their processes and their team so that they can move from chaos to clarity in their business, whether you're a freelancer, agency owner or leading a creative team in an apartment.
This show is designed to give you practical frameworks that create margin in your work and freedom in your life. Let's dive in.
Here's what happens to almost every client I work with. They come to me saying they need better systems, better processes, something to help them get organized, because it's just chaos and madness. And so the first thing we do is we implement the DO versus DUE framework, and we set up their project management system. And then suddenly, boom. They are completely overwhelmed, not because the systems aren't working, but because they're working too well.
For the first time, they can see everything that they actually need to do. And all of these projects floating around in their head, all of these someday ideas, all of those client requests that got buried in an email, it's all there in front of them staring at them from their task list.
I had one client tell me, "Dustin, I thought I had a time management problem. Turns out I have way too many tasks problem." They weren't wrong. When creatives start being systematic, when you start being systematic about capturing and organizing your work, you often discover that you've been trying to drink from a fire hose. And that's where the chaos comes from.
But here's the thing. There's this overwhelming moment when you see things in black and white for the first time. It's actually a breakthrough moment because now instead of the tasks controlling you, you can start making intentional decisions about what deserves your time and creative energy.
You see, most creatives don't have a time shortage. We all have the same amount of time. So why do some produce more quality work with the same amount of time that we have? It's because creatives don't have a time shortage problem. They have a decision shortage problem.
There's this illusion that we always have a full plate when we think our plate is full when it's actually not full. It's overflowing. Creative work naturally expands over time and fills all of your available time. Think about if you're a homeowner and you ever used there's a product called Great Stuff. It's a great name and it's this foam spray that you spray to fill in different gaps. Maybe it's a leak around your window or whatever. But something is leaking, something is wrong and there's a gap where there shouldn't be a gap and so you spray this Great Stuff and it expands to fill that time.
Creative work is just like Great Stuff. It is great stuff. We love doing it, but creative work will naturally expand to fill any available time that it can because without boundaries every opportunity becomes an obligation. Let me say that again. Without boundaries every opportunity becomes an obligation.
And this is why traditional time management fails creative professionals all the time. Time management assumes that all tasks are equal and we know that they're not. Creative work doesn't fit neatly into time blocks. There's ebbs and flows that we have to make room for. And it's actually our energy that matters more than time. And so we end up in this decision fatigue cycle. There's too many choices and that leads to poor choices. We get paralyzed by all the decisions and that creates procrastination. Hey, if I can't figure out what to do next, then I just won't do anything and we shut down. And that overwhelm leads to reactionary instead of proactive, and proactive is where the strategic work really starts to hit the road.
So let me talk you through kind of a three-step approach when it comes to being overwhelmed. When you're overwhelmed you need this systematic approach and it's simple as this: number one brain dump, number two categorize, number three act. Let's walk through these real quick.
Step one, brain dump everything. I will often walk new coaching or consulting clients through this all the time. We sit down with a legal pad away from our computers and away from our phones and we will just start to write down every little floating task that is bouncing around in between your ears onto paper. Write it down on the paper and we're not organizing them. We're just capturing everything that causes any kind of mental tension. Any big projects, small tasks, ideas, concerns, worries, hopes, dreams, whatever it is, we're writing them all down because what that does is it immediately relieves the cloudiness and the mental pressure.
Psychologists know this. That's why they tell you in order to process through certain things in your life, you need to write them down because you need to get them out of your head because what happens in your head is it spirals and it doesn't go anywhere and it's just spiraling and spiraling and what happens when it spirals is it's building energy and it's building tension and there's no release, there's no relief from it whatsoever. So step one is we're gonna brain dump everything.
Step two, I talk about this all the time. Jim Kwik on his podcast for mentalists and brain energy, he talks about this all the time as well, but you need to be ruthless and use the Eisenhower matrix categorizing. Eisenhower matrix categorizing, which we know is the four quadrants. Things are, everything that we dumped on that sheet of paper, we know that it's either urgent and important, or it's just urgent and not important, or it's important but it's not super urgent. And in the fourth category, it's neither important nor urgent.
And so what we're going to do is we're going to take time and we're going to be ruthless about each item that's on that legal pad or on that notepad. And we're going to begin to place them in one of those four quadrants, one of those four boxes. And we're going to be honest about what is truly urgent and what feels urgent. Just because it feels urgent doesn't mean it is urgent. Be honest about what's truly important and what's busy work because most overwhelm that we experience, it comes from treating everything as urgent and important.
And I always tell my clients this, that when you're using the Eisenhower matrix, really only about 15 to 20% of the things that you dumped out on that sheet of paper in step one, really only about 15 to 20% of those things should actually end up in the urgent and important category. If there's more than that, then you have not been ruthless enough. If there's less than that, then maybe you were too ruthless and you need to kind of reprioritize some things. But usually it's the fact that we think everything is urgent and important. And we know that when everything is urgent and important, nothing is urgent and important.
And step three is act on it. Now, how do we know how to act? What is the action for each one of these quadrants? Here's how I break it down. Listen, if it's urgent and important then you need to do it ASAP, but you need to plan better next time. Do it ASAP but plan better next time that it comes around again, and what I mean by ASAP is hey this is kind of your big three or your big frogs of the day or of the week or of the month or however long you're planning it out. These things need to happen and you need to be the one to do it before anything else.
If it's in the quadrant of urgent, but not important, can you automate it? Can you delegate it? Same thing with important, but not urgent. If it's important, but not urgent, can you automate it? And can you delegate it? If it's in one of those either or categories and then listen, if it's not important or urgent, then it means one of two things. It means it's really not needed at all and you need to eliminate it. Or finally, maybe it is needed, but it's just not for right now, then you can procrastinate it. It's okay to procrastinate as long as you give it a date later in time or you give it a place where you can go back and revisit it over and over.
According to the research from the Productivity Institute, knowledge workers spend 41% percent of their time on discretionary activities that could be handled by others or eliminated entirely. So you've brain dumped onto that and now you're looking at that giant list of things. According to statistics about 41 percent of the things that are on that list could either be eliminated entirely or delegated to someone else. So think about that for a minute when you're going through this step one you're going to brain dump step two you're going to use the Eisenhower matrix and step three use the focus funnel so that you know how to act on it.
Now once you've tried this a time or two, it's time to turn this into a habit. Make the whole Eisenhower matrix and focus funnel, I like to use those in tandem. We brain dump and we use the Eisenhower matrix of urgent and important. And then we use that focus funnel. The focus funnel is where we decide whether we need to act on it or we need to delegate, eliminate, automate or procrastinate. And it comes back around to us doing it again later. Make this a habit.
Maybe it's weekly, maybe it's monthly, maybe it's quarterly. For me, I do this about once a month right now because after about a month's worth of creative work, my brain starts to feel that cloudiness again. And whenever I feel that cloudiness coming on, it's probably because there's too much up here and I have not released it. And so what I'll do is I'll write it down. I'll put things through the Eisenhower matrix and then I'll use the focus funnel to determine where it goes.
So whether you do it weekly or monthly or quarterly, whatever it is, just schedule 30 minutes in your block of time. Whether it could be every Friday, could be the last Friday of every month, first Friday of every month, whatever. Schedule 30 minutes for the focus funnel review. So you've gotten to the point where you've dumped it, you've gone through the Eisenhower matrix. So now you see those things in the Eisenhower matrix, schedule 30 minutes to just go through those things and go, okay, that needs to be eliminated. That can easily be automated. I know somebody who can help me automate that. This one can be easily delegated. This one is procrastinated. I can come back and do that later, whatever the case may be.
And when you do this review, you're not going to just look at what's currently kind of built up until now. You're going to look ahead a little bit at the upcoming week, the upcoming month, the upcoming quarter with this fresh perspective and you're going to question everything that made it onto your task list.
This is where the default to no policy comes in. Every new request that enters your brain, every new idea that pops in. Maybe we should, maybe we should, maybe we should is immediately met with a no until proven otherwise and proven otherwise just means that you're going to ask yourself if I say yes to this that means I'm going to have to say no to something else. Every yes is saying no to something else. So what is it that if me saying yes to this, what am I saying no to? That's the default no policy.
And over time, you'll start to build this elimination muscle. You'll start to whittle down. You'll start to notice things quicker. In the beginning, it might take some time to brain dump to Eisenhower matrix to focus funnel. It's OK if it takes time. It's a new habit. But as you begin to build that elimination muscle, you'll start to quickly identify those obvious time wasters. You'll start to really question the we've always done it this way activities and start to go, well, why have we always done it that way? And is there a better way to do that? You'll start to eliminate even before you have to try to optimize something, which is an incredible, incredible superpower for creatives.
Research from the Harvard Business Review shows that owners who regularly practice this elimination tactic, they are 25% more effective and report significant lower stress levels. And I know that's what we all want.
So what do we do with this now? How do we implement this whole focus funnel situation starting today? What's easy is one, two, three that I mentioned earlier. Number one, right now do a 15 minute brain dump. Get every task, project, idea, concern out of your head and on to paper. Don't organize it. Just capture everything that is creating mental tension for you.
Step two, you're going to take that list and you're going to ruthlessly categorize each item into one of the four Eisenhower quadrants. Urgent, important, urgent and important, urgent but not important, important but not urgent, and neither urgent or important. Be honest about what's truly urgent versus what just feels urgent and what's truly important versus what's just busy work.
And step three, we're gonna apply the focus funnel actions. We're gonna handle important and urgent items immediately. We're gonna automate some urgent but not important things or delegate. We're gonna delegate or automate the things that are important but not urgent or urgent but not important. And we're gonna eliminate or consciously on purpose procrastinate everything else that does not fall into the other boxes.
And lastly, as this begins to take habit right now that you've done this for the first time today or this week, schedule a weekly time or a monthly time or a quarterly time to go through this. I would suggest in the beginning that you schedule it for 15 minutes every week, every Friday. I say Friday because by Friday you've built up all of the things in your head or whatever the end of your work week is. If the end of your work week is Thursday, then do it on Thursdays, but in your work week because you don't want to carry all of that mental tension into the weekend and then begin your next week, your next work week with all of that stuff stored up. You want to begin your week fresh and organized and emptied of the last week's problems and worries. So if it's Friday just call it a focus funnel Friday and have that 15 to 30 minute session with yourself and if you need other people around bring other people into it to help think through the things. Really this is about you here, not about your team. Because when you do this well, then you can lead your team well as well.
Now this focus funnel concept was originally introduced by author Tim Ferriss in his massively successful book, The Four Hour Workweek. So I highly suggest you pick that up. Another one that I read last year, complete master class in doing fewer things better is called Essentialism. That's by Greg McKeown. I hope I'm saying his last name right. So definitely check that out. I also have a full focus funnel action guide that you can download available to you for free at dustinpead.com slash free. So go and check that out.
Listen, the truth is that you're never going to have enough time for everything, but you can have enough time for the right things. And the focus funnel isn't about cramming more into your schedule. It's about creating space for work that matters. When you regularly eliminate, automate, delegate, and strategically procrastinate, you're not just managing tasks better. You're reclaiming your creative focus.
So start with one thing. Pick the most obvious task that you can eliminate and delete it right now. Do you feel that? Do you feel what clarity feels like? So get into that this week. Start this method right away as soon as possible. At the end of your work week go ahead and do these steps that we talked about today.
For more frameworks like this and more free resources you can find at dustinpead.com slash free. You can follow me on social media at dustinpead. Remember creativity doesn't have to be chaotic. It can be systematically excellent though.
Next week we're going to talk about something that every creative professional needs but most ignore until it's too late. This is the renewal ritual that every creative needs. Burnout isn't just about working too much. It's about systematically renewing your creative energy. And I'll share some specific practices that keep top creative professionals energized and inspired even during their busiest seasons. Don't miss it. Talk to you next time on Creativity Made Easy podcast. Have a great week.