Prioritize Your Time Like a Lion; Hunt Antelope, Do Not Chase Mice
Picture the scene in your mind’s eye…
You are a lion, majestic, powerful. But you are hungry, your pride is hungry, and needs food to survive. You crouch in the grasses of the African Savannah, scanning the landscape for prey that will give you and your family the nourishment needed to not only survive, but to thrive.
You look towards the west and see an antelope, large and muscular. Definitely enough meat on its bones to provide several satisfying meals. But it will take effort and energy to hunt. You look towards the east and you see a pack of mice, small with little meat on them. You could chase them, and maybe eating enough of them could keep you alive. Definitely not enough to thrive, but maybe enough to survive.
Which would you choose to hunt; the antelope or the mice?
The answer seems easy. Of course you would choose to hunt the antelope. The effort may be great but so is the reward; enough food to sustain you and your pride. You will be healthy and happy. Chasing mice would expend a lot of energy with very little reward. And in the end, if you only chase mice, you will not get nearly enough nourishment to survive.
Ok, now let’s modify this scenario to one you experience in your day to day life…
Picture that you are at your desk ready to start your day. On your left, you have materials that relate to a key project that will help you accomplish a major professional goal. On the right, you have a scratch pad with the previous day’s to-do list jotted down with minor items you thought of, or were thrown at you in the course of the day. Which one will be your focus today? The project that will help bring professional development and success, or the to-do list that will accomplish nothing major and bring very little meaningful results?
Again, the answer seems obvious, you would (or should) turn your focus towards the key project that will push your organization forward and bring you greater professional growth. Seems like a no-brainer, right?
But if we take an honest look at ourselves, and what our focus is on a daily basis, we may find that too much of our time is spent procrastinating on the key activities that bring the greatest value to our organizations. Instead we spend our time on menial tasks that are easy to complete but do not move the needle at all for ourselves, our families, or our business.
We may need to re-tool our approach to time and task management to make sure that we are hunting Antelope and not chasing Mice.
Hunting Antelope vs. Hunting Mice
I was first introduced to the hunting Antelope vs. chasing Mice concept in Tim Ferriss’ book Tools of Titans . It is attributed to a quote by Newt Gingrich:
“A lion is fully capable of capturing, killing, and eating a field mouse. But it turns out that the energy required to do so exceeds the caloric content of the mouse itself. So a lion that spent its day hunting and eating field mice would slowly starve to death. A lion can’t live on field mice. A lion needs antelope. Antelope are big animals. They take more speed and strength to capture and kill, and once killed, they provide a feast for the lion and her pride. … So ask yourself at the end of the day, ‘Did I spend today chasing mice or hunting antelope?'” — Newt Gingrich
This is a great analogy and approach for time and task management. It creates a clear mindset for approaching and prioritizing your time. I take this approach as I plan my day and it has helped me to keep my focus on what is most important.
So let’s break down the key components of the hunting Antelope vs. chasing Mice concept:
- The Lion = YOU!
- The Antelope = The most critical priorities in your life, personal and professional.
- The Mice = The things that you do that distract you and keep you from accomplishing your highest priorities.
The analogy is clear and easy to follow. You are a Lion that ultimately cannot survive chasing Mice, you must hunt Antelope to thrive. To transition that analogy to how you choose to spend your time; you must make sure your time is focused on accomplishing your highest priority items, not wasting your time on tasks or time killers that bring little to no value. In order to have a satisfying, fulfilling, and successful life, on your own terms, you MUST spend your time hunting your Antelope.
Ok, so the analogy is clear and we understand that our time is best spent on our highest priority items (hunting Antelope) and not spent on small tasks (chasing Mice). So how can we go about changing our behaviors on a daily basis to make sure most of our time is spent hunting Antelope?
Identify Your Antelope and Your Mice
The first thing to do is to make sure you have a clear understanding of what your highest priority items are and what your time wasters are. Once this is done you will have a better idea of where your time should, and should not, be spent. In other words; what are the Antelope you need to hunt? In order to help you identify your high priority items and your time wasters I recommend two exercises: Time Recording and identifying Urgent vs. Important activities.
Time Recording
This practice is recommended by Peter Drucker in The Effective Executive. It basically is what it’s name says it is. You record your time throughout the course of the day to better understand where it is being spent. The exercise is simple; just take the time throughout the day to record what you are doing. You can record this in a notebook or on a daily planner. When I did this I printed the “Day” view of my Microsoft Outlook calendar and used that to record my time. It is a simple but effective exercise. If you do this for about a week or two you will have a very clear understanding of what your time is being spent on. Once you have completed the time recording, list out the activities you have been spending your time on.
Urgent vs. Important Activities
Once you have a clearer understanding of where your time is being spent, plot those activities on Steven Covey’s Time Management matrix to get a better understanding of your urgent vs. important tasks. In a nutshell, urgent tasks are tasks we complete because we are under the gun. These are crises and pressing problems we have to take care of right away. Important tasks are the ones that bring the most value to ourselves, our family, and our careers. These tasks do not have a pressing time requirement. These are our Antelope, these are the tasks we should be prioritizing and maximizing our focus on. Covey’s matrix provides us with a tool we can plot our activities on to see if our time is spent on urgent or important tasks. The matrix is broken up into 4 quadrants in the mix of urgent vs. important. Your goal is to commit time to Quadrant 2 activities, important but not urgent.
Take the activities you have identified using Drucker’s time recording process and plot them on Covey’s Time Management Matrix. This will help you better identify your time wasters (Mice) and your highest priority tasks (Antelope). Your Mice tend to live in quadrants 3 and 4. Your Antelope live mostly in quadrant 2, but may also drift into quadrant 1 if you procrastinate on them and you are approaching deadlines.
Put the Antelope in Your Sights
Now that you have a clearer picture of your Antelope and your Mice, it is time to put the Antelope in your sight and set your day up to maximize your Antelope hunting time. You need to make sure your focus is on the highest priority items in your life and the low value tasks are being marginalized. This can be done by developing a system and using your calendar.
The Importance of a System
In order to make sure your time is spent on your highest priorities it is critical to follow some kind of time management system diligently. It could be a a sophisticated system like David Allen’s Getting Things Done . Or it could be something simple like blocking time off at the beginning of every day to write down your biggest priorities on an index card. There are a number of time management systems available out there and I would encourage you to explore and experiment to find a system that fits your personality, and that you can make a commitment to follow.
Personally, I follow a system that I learned from Sally McGhee’s Take Back Your Life. It is a system that uses Microsoft Outlook to help manage your time and tasks. I have modified it a bit to fit my personality and lifestyle. But the important thing is finding some kind of time management system that you can follow.
Use Your Calendar
No matter what time management system you choose to implement, one of the most powerful habits you can implement to become more successful at hunting Antelope is blocking Antelope hunting time off on your calendar. This means actually blocking time off on your calendar to focus on your highest priority tasks. Once you start doing this your calendar becomes a much more powerful tool. It no longer is just a time management tool, it is a goal management tool. You schedule meetings on your calendar to prioritize them, lock in the time, and make sure you will attend. The same holds true for your highest priority tasks. If you schedule them on your calendar, you lock in that time and you are more likely to complete them.
Again, I use Microsoft Outlook to manage my Antelope hunting time. I block time off on my calendar for projects and high priority tasks. This is not meeting time. This is time that I am in “hunting Antelope” mode and focused on completing the specific task that the time is dedicated to. Hint: If you choose to use your Outlook calendar to schedule Antelope hunting time make sure your time is marked as “‘Busy” so your colleagues will not think you are available and try to schedule a meeting with you during this precious time.
Another critical consideration is to identify the time of day that your feel most energized and productive. Use that time as your Antelope hunting time. Myself, I am much more productive in the morning and my brain tends to get a little more scattered in the afternoon. So I block of my mornings as Antelope hunting time and do my best to schedule meetings in the afternoon.
The Importance of Discipline
As Jocko Willink says: “Discipline is freedom“. Discipline is the most important factor in becoming a more successful Antelope hunter. The perfect time management system will fail if you are not disciplined to following it. Blocking time off on your calendar for your highest priority tasks is meaningless if you do not have the discipline to honor your calendar. That is why it is important to find a system that works for you and that you know you will be disciplined to follow. Start small and set yourself up for success. Start with a daily 5 minute calibration to chck your project/task list and calendar to make sure you have blocked off time to accomplish your highest priorities. Successful Antelope hunters are disciplined to following their system.
You Still Have to Clean Up the Mice
As you start focusing your efforts on hunting Antelope you will realize something: The Mice are still there. They are pesky and if not tended to they will accumulate and cause chaos. You still need to dedicate time to chasing your Mice. All the miscellaneous small tasks on your to-do list still need to be completed. As much as we would like to spend all our time on our highest priority, most fulfilling projects; we still need to do the laundry. There are a couple things you can do to help keep the Mice at bay.
Delegate
Something that is low value to you may be a great development opportunity for someone else. Look at the items you have identified as time wasters or low value tasks from your Drucker time recording exercise. Determine which of these could be delegated to someone else that could perhaps help with their development. For example: Approving invoices is a low value use of my time, but it needs to be done. However, for one of my staff members it may be an opportunity to better understand what constitutes our operating expenses and provide them an opportunity to think creatively on how we can reduce expenses. So, if I delegate a task that is Mice chasing to me, it can become a development opportunity for someone else. You get the idea, evaluate your low priority tasks and see what could be delegated. You, the Lion, should hunt the Antelope, the Mice should be delegated as much as possible.
Use Your Calendar
Again, this is where having a disciplined system helps us. We need to block time off on our calendars for Mice chasing. Once we have identified the time of the day or day of week we are most productive (our Antelope hunting time); we can use the other time slots as our Mice chasing time. Personally, I block off Friday as my Mice chasing day. I do not schedule any meetings or block of any time for high priority projects on Friday. I use my Fridays to do the lower value tasks that cannot be delegated.
In Conclusion
Time is the currency of our lives. It is the stuff that our life is made of. It is the most valuable resource that we have. If we are not proactively making sure that our time is spent on our most valuable tasks and priorities then we are wasting the most precious gift that we have.
Approaching your time like a Lion on the hunt for Antelope will provide you with a mindset that puts the focus on the biggest, most challenging, and ultimately most rewarding items in your life. It will help you to increase your influence and value in your organization, your family, and your community. People will come to know you as someone who gets the important things done and doors of opportunity will open.
In today’s world the Mice chasers are being automated, but the Antelope hunters will rule the jungle.
Be a Lion! Hunt Antelope, not Mice.
“Things that matter most must never be at the mercy of things that matter least.” —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
