Last week I mentioned I've been doing something I call “5×5” to help keep me focused on my most important tasks. It's working pretty well.

It's really a version of something I've done for years when I've been doing one-off projects, but now I'm applying it to ongoing activities.

For me at least, projects tend to be the things I do where I waste the least time and get the most done. And a lot of that is because of having a very focused project plan.

When I'm embarking on a new project like creating a new product or exploring a new marketing channel I make a plan. I write down my overall goal for the project, think through what deliverables I need to produce, then identify the most important activities I need to do to create those deliverables and achieve the goal.

Being rather lazy, I always try to cut down the list of activities to only the ones that are absolutely necessary to hit my goal.

You could call that “value engineering” I guess, but I call it “not wanting to work too hard” :)

The end result is I get very focused on only the most important activities and don't mess around with “shallow work” that achieves something but doesn't really have a big impact. 

A few weeks ago when I looked at where I was wasting the most time, I noticed it wasn't with my projects. It was with my ongoing activities. The things I do week in, week out to run my business.  

So for me, growing my email list, getting more Momentum Club members and serving them well, and growing my influence in the consulting/coaching world are my three biggest ongoing goals. Each week most of the things I do somehow relate to one of those three big goals.

But what I haven't done is analysed each of those goals in the same way I would with a project goal to figure out what are the most critical activities that have the biggest impact on them.

Of course, I have a gut feel for it. But that's not enough.

It's all too easy to chat and answer people's questions on a random forum related to marketing thinking it's helping me to position myself as a marketing expert for consultants. But in the cold light of day, every minute I spend doing that is a minute I'm not spending doing something with more impact like writing a book on marketing for consultants, creating a new product, or even helping people in a forum focused more directly on marketing for consultants for example.

This is where 5×5 comes in.

Technically, it's actually “3-5 x 3-5” – but that doesn't sound so snappy.

Here's what you do…

Step one: make a big list of your most important ongoing goals. Usually, that's the easy bit. For me, my top 3 jumped out.

I had some other minor goals, and I initially listed some important goals that were actually one-off projects, like creating new products or revamping my website. For this list you want to focus on things you'll be working on week in, week out pretty much all year long.

Make sure you get the right level of goal. “Make loads of money” is too high level. You want a goal where you can quite easily see the things you need to do to achieve it.

With goals, you normally want to set some sort of measurable target like “grow Momentum Club membership to 500 members by the end of 2017” but it turns out that for this exercise you don't need to be so precise. Just knowing that I want to grow membership (and make sure I deliver great service to all my members) is enough.

Narrow down your list to the top 3-5 most important goals. Yep, you have to prioritise. Which ones are going to have the most impact on your business short or long-term? Which ones do you have a burning desire to achieve?

Doesn't matter what criteria you use, you have to narrow them down. You can't do everything.

Step two: for each of your chosen goals, brainstorm all the activities you could do on an ongoing basis that would contribute to achieving them.

For growing and serving Momentum Club my list included running and improving my Facebook ads, adding new sources of traffic, running and improving my “more leads and clients” webinar where I promote membership, testing and improving the conversions on my sales page and checkout, creating new content for Momentum Club on a regular basis, answering questions in the Momentum Club forum, creating new offers/packages, doing more joint ventures to promote membership, etc. 

I came up with a dozen or so activities. One important one only struck me a day after making the initial list, so give yourself some “sink time” before finalising it.

Do the same for all your 3-5 goals.

Then go through each of the activities and highlight the 3-5 ones you believe will have the most impact on achieving the goal.

There's no hard science to this. Sometimes you might have evidence that one activity is a big driver of that goal. But often it will just be based on your experience and gut feel. That doesn't matter. What's important is that you make choices.

My suggestion is to review this list every 3 months and to adjust if it turns out that some activities weren't as effective as you thought.

You now have your 5×5 (or “3-5 x 3-5”). Somewhere between 9 and 25 key activities that you're going to be doing on an ongoing basis week in, week out.

You won't necessarily be doing every activity every week. But what you'll do is that every week when you come to fill your schedule with activities, this is the menu you'll look at to fill in the slots in your calendar.

Of course, you'll have meetings and other commitments too. And you have the activities related to any one-off projects you're working on (if you have a lot of other commitments like this, I recommend you go for at most 3 ongoing goals).

By filling up your schedule each week with your most important activities you'll be avoiding too much “dead time” where you just decide to do something ad-hoc and you inevitably end up doing some shallow work that's easy and gratifying but not important.

Now as you're reading this you've probably spotted a flaw in the plan.

Just because an activity doesn't make it into your 5×5 doesn't mean you don't have to do it.

It's doubtful that answering emails is one of the top 5 activities for any goal. But you still need to do it. It's doubtful that contributing to an expert roundup blog post is going to be in my top 5 for growing my influence in the consulting/coaching world, but if I had 15 minutes spare it wouldn't be all that bad a thing to do (and might be a nice distraction from more focused work).

So in addition to scheduling in your important 5×5 activities, you need to schedule in a little time each day for shallow work. Maybe 20 minutes before lunch and before finishing for the day to catch up on emails. Maybe another 20 minutes twice a day for social media posting, etc.  

It depends, to some degree, on how many emails you typically need to process. For me, it's quite a lot (I don't take phone calls so I get more email). So I've started scheduling in 3×30 minute slots during the day for email and social media.

The good news is that apparently, our brains can only handle about 4 hours a day of really focused deep work. So in any working day, there's actually plenty of time to fit in the shallow work. The key is we need to schedule the shallow work around the important 5×5 deep work rather than just jumping from task to task ad hoc and inevitably taking the easy path to shallow work most of the time.

5×5 is working well for me so far. Truthfully, I don't always stick to it. Far from it. I don't think my “focus” muscle is well developed enough yet after years of being too easily distracted.

But it's coming. Last week I got more deep work done than I have in a long time. I made huge progress on thinking about a new service I want to offer, and I wouldn't have been able to do that without focusing my time down on my 5×5 and my big projects.

Your next step: up to you really. It took me half a day to work through my 5×5. It's a commitment. But honestly, I'd recovered that time in real work done in less than a week.