You need to systematically decide what deserves your attention now, what deserves your attention later, and what doesn’t deserve your attention at all.

How to do a weekly review:

1. List Your Biggest Wins
2. Review the Prior Week
3. Review Your Lists and Notes
4. Check Goals, Projects, Events, Meetings, and Deadlines
5. Designate Your Weekly Big 3 Things to Accomplish
6. Plan Your Rejuvenation

Decide what goes on your Weekly Big 3 using The Eisenhower Matrix.

Spend 95% of your time on Quadrant 1 and 2 activities. Clear Quadrant 3 tasks quickly (delegate what you can) and eliminate all Quadrant 4 tasks.

How to design your day:

• Plan days solely focused on tasks and refuse any meeting requests for that day
• Shoot for three, and only three, key tasks each day (your Daily Big 3). Let your Weekly Big 3 inform your Daily Big 3
• Schedule time to do your Daily Big 3 on your calendar

Chapter 7 – Consolidate: Plan Your Ideal Week

Design your work to focus on just one thing at a time.

Batching: lumping similar tasks together and doing them in a dedicated block of time

MegaBatching: organizing entire days around similar activities to enable you to stay focused and build momentum.

The 3 categories of activity:

1. Front Stage. The tasks for which you’re hired and paid. The key functions, primary deliverables, the line items on your performance review. If it delivers the results for which your boss and/or customers are paying you, that’s Front Stage work.
2. Back Stage. Includes step-two activities (specifically, elimination, automation, and delegation) plus coordination, preparation, maintenance, and development. The tasks necessary for Front Stage performance.
3. Off Stage. Refers to time when you’re not working. Off Stage is crucial to restoring your energy so you have something to offer when you come back to the stage.

How to plan your ideal week in 3 steps:

1. Stages. Decide for each day if you’ll be Front Stage, Back Stage, or Off Stage. Reserve at least two days for Front Stage.
2. Themes. Indicate what type of activities you’ll do on individual days during certain blocks of time. An easy way to start is to think of the morning, workday, and evening.
3. Activities. Group the individual activities that will fall into those themes.

If you regularly struggle to get to the bottom of your to-do list and think the solution is finding more hours in the week, best-selling author Michael Hyatt says you’re wasting your time. Instead, the leadership and personal growth expert insists that the key to achieving more is to actually do less. Tune in as Michael shares his three-step process for taking control of the time you have so you can become more focused and productive—and infinitely less overwhelmed. Now that’s what we call a win-win. We will return to our study of Free to Focus in the next episode.

Chapter 6 – Delegate: Clone Yourself—or Better

Delegation means focusing primarily on the work only you can do by transferring everything else to others who are more passionate about the work or proficient in the tasks.

Some of us refuse to delegate by convincing ourselves we can’t afford it.

But the hours you spend on Desire Zone tasks will always be more profitable than the time you’re wasting anywhere else, so the cost of delegation pays for itself—and then some.

How to delegate:

1. Decide what to delegate
2. Select the best person
3. Communicate the workflow
4. Provide the necessary resources
5. Specify the delegation level
6. Give them room to operate
7. Check in and provide feedback as needed

The 5 Levels of Delegation:

1. Level 1. You want the person to do exactly what you’ve asked them to do—no more, no less.
2. Level 2. You want the person to examine or research a topic and report back to you.
3. Level 3. You’re giving the person more room to participate in the problem-solving process but you are still reserving the final decision for yourself. 
4. Level 4. You want the person to evaluate the options, make a decision on their own, execute the decision, and then give you an update after the fact.
5. Level 5. You hand the entire project or task over to someone else and exit the decision altogether.