Whenever I get too little sleep, or I feel a deluge of projects coming on, I feel myself start to panic. There’s a ton to do and I’m afraid I won’t be able to get it all done. An ever-expanding set of projects, ideas, and opportunities can and will continuously fill your plate until you’re drowning under the weight of it all.
Like weeds in a hot summer garden following weeks of abundant rainfall, you’ve got to get out the weed-whacker regularly and keep the projects at bay, or risk drowning out the plants you’ve been trying to grow all along.
The result? Paralysis. Indecision. Procrastination. Stress.
Workplace stress affects as many as 80% of today’s workers, and 40% of people report that their workplaces are extremely stressful and that it affects them in their everyday lives and personal time.1 2 Even as an entrepreneur, where I’m my own boss (and employee), the workload I place on myself can start to pile too high.
And herein lies the question:
How do you find a way to prioritize and focus when there are so many projects calling for your attention, and a never-ending stream of new projects?
That’s what today’s article is about.
In this article, I’ll tell you a story about finding focus that comes from Warren Buffett that has been extremely helpful to my own practice and to the people I work with. This practice has radically shifted how I show up to my own work, and it’s changed how I parent. It’s counter-culture and challenging to implement, but it works.
So if you’re struggling to focus or you’re stressed by too many projects, read on.
Warren Buffett—or a story about him—might have the answer.
The Warren Buffett* 25/5 strategy for finding focus
*This is not actually attributable to Warren Buffett, and when pressed, apparently he said he doesn’t remember this story at all — but the internet has repeatedly shared this story as something that comes from him.
For the longest time, I’d heard this story—this philosophy, really—that has been attributed to Warren Buffett. Apparently his pilot, a guy named Mike Flint, was talking to Buffett. Flint asks Buffett for life advice and how to get find time to get everything done he wants to get done in his life. Buffett replied with a three-step approach to solving the problem. It made such an impression on Mike—or whoever first heard the story—that this story passed on from person to person.
The story has been retold enough that it falls into internet lore, and you’ll find it on nearly every news outlet if you search, but try to trace the story back to an actual source, you won’t find it. The story is most likely fake—or it’s been transmuted in an elaborate game of “Internet Telephone,” but the process is so useful that I’m re-sharing it here. Take the truthiness of the story in question, but follow the steps and see what happens. Regardless of whether or not Buffett actually said any of these things, the process is still valuable.
STEP 1: Write out your top 25 career goals, life goals, project dreams, and aspirations.
What are your biggest goals in your life? If you don’t have a bucket list, take time to write them down. Even if you only have time to scratch out your top ten or so right now, do this first step—it’s important.
For example, you might have “run a marathon” on your bucket list, or “write a book,” or “have a family.” Whatever your top 25 list is, make it. Get at least 15 on the page.
It can take some time to write out a list. It can be between 20 and 30 things, more is fine as well. But take some time to write down what’s on your goals and aspirations for your own life. Now, this doesn’t have to be a list of everything you should do or that you’re supposed to do, but you can add those to the list, too.
This can be physical well-being, friendship goals, travel dreams, experiences, projects you want to build, things you want to write, professional certifications, and more.
If you’re still struggling, then write down all the things you’re currently working towards, and write down the things that occupy your brain space. For example, if you’re feeling pressure to get a degree, or fulfill some cultural or familial duty, add it to the list.
Only when you finish this list —
— GO FINISH YOUR LIST! —
Then go to Step 2.
STEP 2: Circle your top 5.
Now that you have your list of All The Things, you’re going to go back through the list and circle the top five.
What are the biggest career or life goals you have?
For me, it’s easy to pick my top two:
Create my own family—have babies (if I can).
Write books.
I’ve got a few more in the top five, including running my own successful company and writing for major publications and outlets. Those are in my top four and they are nearly everything I’m working on building and making right now.
Down later on the list—it’s been a while since I’ve done this—but I have other goals and things I enjoy, like running a marathon, competing in triathlons, traveling and visiting lots of countries around the world, learning another language, and even completing yoga teacher training.
Once you have your top 5 list, then it’s time for Step 3.
Pause here and make sure you do Step 1 and Step 2 before going any further.
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.
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You'll really want to do this before you move on!
STEP 3: The Avoid-At-All-Costs List.
This is where the list becomes really interesting.
Apparently Buffett goes on to ask his employee: “What are you going to do with the other twenty things?”
He responds: “Well the top five are my primary focus but the other twenty come in at a close second. They are still important so I’ll work on those intermittently as I see fit as I’m getting through my top five. They are not as urgent but I still plan to give them dedicated effort.”
“No,” says Buffett. “You’ve got it all wrong.”
“Everything you didn’t circle in your top five just because your Avoid-At-All-Costs-List.”
“Everything You Didn’t Circle Just Became Your ‘Avoid At All Costs List.’”
Everything that’s on your list that’s not in your top five? Those are your highest distractions.
Because it’s not things that we don’t want that will distract us.
It’s secondary goals and wishes that will pull our focus, cause us to lose ground, and ultimately distract us from the very things we want.
James Clear, a popular productivity blogger and the author of Atomic Habits, wrote about why these very things are the biggest productivity killers in our lives:
“Getting rid of wasteful items and decisions is relatively easy. It’s eliminating things you care about that is difficult. It is hard to prevent using your time on things that are easy to rationalize, but that have little payoff. The tasks that have the greatest likelihood of derailing your progress are the ones you care about, but that aren’t truly important. […] Every behavior has a cost. Even neutral behaviors aren’t really neutral. They take up time, energy, and space that could be put toward better behaviors or more important tasks.”3
It’s our inability to focus on the things that matter the most that cause us the most heartache.
I’ve been guilty of this time and time again.
In my adventures of book writing, I’ve often gotten lost in multiple-idea-itis, and I’ve scrawled and scratched the ideas all over my notebooks. Eagerly, I’ll start writing one of them, getting thousands of words down until I find myself somewhere in the 20,000 word mark and feeling overwhelmed and at a crossroads. Certainly, the next idea to come to my mind unrelated to the book has potential—maybe more potential than this one?
And so for years, I’ve stumbled, not knowing that pushing through the blockages and challenging moments at each of those writing thresholds is the more important task, and I am a bit sheepish to say that I have at least a dozen partial drafts buried in my hard drives.
The harder truth? I have to ask myself if I would be okay with writing 80% of five books and never having a single book make it to the light of day. This is why book writing can be so hard. So if I want to publish a book, however imperfectly written and however full of mistakes—I’ll need push through the process until I make a book, full of mistakes and errors and humanity. But this also requires a ruthless lid on the other ideas on the shelf, canning my easily distractible mind and asking it to keep returning to the attention of this project until the project is realized.
This is so hard for me.
Anti-Goals and why they matter
Most projects have clear goals and a desired outcomes. But folks often fail to create a list of known anti-goals. Anti-goals are objectives that you actively avoid, as they are the opposite of your goals, or impediments to your progress.
Your “avoid-at-all-costs” list just became anti-goals to your top five.
“Spending time on secondary priorities is the reason you have 20 half-finished projects instead of five completed ones,” writes James Clear. “The most dangerous distractions are the ones you love, but that don’t love you back.”
The bigger you get, the more you manage, the longer you live—the harder yet more important this is. We won’t arrive at focus unless we do the work to get there. Focusing ruthlessly on fewer things requires deep focus and a commitment.
I am still learning this.
In work [in life, in parenting]: pick your top two
IN BUSINESS
In many companies, leaders suffer from the dangerous assumption that they can have three, five, even ten project priorities running at any one time. It’s worth it to stop and ask whether or not these objectives are actually in competition with each other. Are they competing for time, energy, and resources? Does having more goals slow down the process or viability of each goal? What if the reason you’re not having success at your initiative is simply because you’re running too many burners at once?
Take the time to cut half the work off of your plate, and double down on the initiatives that really matter. The painful part is having to decide what’s first, and which of your darlings you need to let go of.
IN PARENTING
In parenting, I follow the same strategy. Rather than try to somehow optimize all of my parenting and be The Best Parent Ever (this is an impossible goal), Alex and I have tried to focus on one or two things at a time, and just do those things. For the longest time, it was Sleep and Reading. That was it. And when transition seasons came along (potty training, new schools, focused learning needs, etc) — that was one of the top two, and we had to drop something else.
So much of the world acts like we can optimize all of parenting, as if we live in a world devoid of constraints. That’s not a real world.
We have limited time, energy, and resources.
So pick two…
… or up to five.
— Sarah Peck
👾 Founders with Kids community — helping tired parents make friends
💜 The Wise Women’s Council incubator
🎧 The Startup Parent Podcast
Workplaces attitudes about stress and overwork.
The quotes from this story come from Scott Dinsmore’s original telling of the 25/5 rule and James Clear’s essay on prioritization.