Areas of Focus -V- Your Core Tasks

Do you find distinguishing between the important and the trivial difficult? Well, this week, that’s the question I’m answering this week.   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre The Time Sector Course Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page   Script Episode 132 Hello and welcome to episode 132 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. There’s a huge difference between trivial and critical tasks and I am pretty sure most of you listening know that. But, while we may think we understand this difference, how many of us actually know the difference between the two? Well. I shall be answering that question this week. Now, before we get to the question and answer. For those of you who have already joined my Time Sector course, I just want to let you know that I have added two classes based on some of the questions that were asked. The first is how to manage actionable email and the second how to create a master projects list. So, if you have taken the course and have not seen those additional classes, they are there in the course now. And if you have not joined yet, you can still get the course for $39.99 for a couple more days. The early bird special offer will be ending very soon, so please don’t miss out. This course is revolutionary and will change the way you manage your work and your tasks for the better. Gone will be the overwhelm of an unwieldy projects list, tasks will no longer disappear and die in a bottomless pit of tasks hidden inside old, out of date projects and instead, you will have a very active list of tasks that require a lot less time to manage.  Full details of the course are in the show notes. Okay, on with the show and that means it’s now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Sonia. Sonia asks: Thank you, Carl, for the great Time Sector course. It has really simplified the way I manage my work. I have a question about what you describe as “core tasks” could you explain a bit more what you mean by these and how they are different from areas of focus?  Thank you, Sonia, for your question.  I felt adding a section about “core tasks” was important because I have noticed a lot of people get caught up in trivialities, falsely believing these trivialities are important to the success of a goal or a project. They are not and often they cause distraction from the main objective and contribute to the project’s or goal’s failure  Now, to define a “core task” you should ask yourself: what are the tasks I do that directly contributes to my income, career and life success?  Now, this may not be as easy as it first appears. Often the work that directly contributes to your income, career and life success is not obvious. To give you a simple example: Let’s imagine you want to become a champion body-builder. What would be the “core tasks” that will help you to reach the goal of becoming a champion bodybuilder?  The two core tasks would be lifting weights and diet.  This means that as long as you make sure you do your workouts every day and you eat the right foods, you will have contributed 80% of the work you need to achieve your goal. However, if you were just starting out with this goal you would also need to find the right gym, get the right personal trainer (at least to start with), the right workout clothes, the right supplements and the right training programmes.  There’s actually quite a lot that needs to be done in order to get close to achieving the goal of becoming a champion body-builder.  Now, in this example, if you are not focused on your core tasks—the weight lifting and diet, it does not matter how many persona