What is a $1 task?
$1 tasks are pieces of work that need to be done, but offer no progress towards your North Star.
“I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.” - College president, Northwestern University in Evanston
The problem with these tasks is they eat up your time, their urgency grabs your attention and pulls you away from strategic work. If you are not careful you will spend a whole week just getting through $1 tasks - and after a solid weeks effort you will have little to show for it.
For example if you are having building work done on your office space, there will be lots of details that need attending to, but none of this work will help you towards your strategic goals (unless the building of the office is the goal). Imagine spending days going back and forth on minutia such as paint colours, furnishings etc - none of which is actually helping your business.
How can you remove $1 tasks?
Larger organisations hire Virtual, Executive or Personal assistants to remove these tasks from their desk, but not everyone can afford this.
Timeboxing is a great technique - allocate a set amount of time each day to working on these tasks. Get them done quickly and remove them from your list.
Where are they coming from?
As part of our coaching we identify the source of tasks each week that are $1 tasks and find out their origin. If we can prevent them from occurring in the first place this frees up time for more strategic work. Try to identify where your $1 tasks are coming from and create systems/processes to stop them at source.
Can AI help?
Automation of these tasks is a great way to speed through them during your timebox. As AI becomes more powerful and integrated it will be able to get a wider context and provide higher quality responses faster to get these jobs done.
Look at your week
At the end of your week, have a look at your completed tasks and ask yourself “How much time this week did I spend on strategic tasks, and how much on $1 tasks?”
Summary
- $1 tasks are work that are not strategic but fill up your time
- Identify where they are coming from to prevent more in future
- Timebox and automate these tasks to get them done quickly