Warren Buffett’s “2 List” Strategy for Focused Attention

This was originally posted by James Clear, of jamesclear.com
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Warren Buffett’s “2 List” Strategy for Focused Attention
by James Clear
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Buffett uses a simple 3-step productivity strategy to help his employees
determine their priorities and actions. You may find this method useful for making decisions and getting yourself to commit to doing one thing right away. Here’s how it works…
One day, Buffett asked his personal pilot to go through the 3-step exercise.
STEP 1: Buffett started by asking the pilot, named Mike Flint, to write down his top 25 career goals. So, Flint took some time and wrote them down.
STEP 2: Then, Buffett asked Flint to review his list and circle his top 5 goals. Again, Flint took some time, made his way through the list, and eventually decided on his 5 most important goals.
STEP 3: At this point, Flint had two lists. The 5 items he had circled were List A, and the 20 items he had not circled were List B.
Flint confirmed that he would start working on his top 5 goals right away. And that’s when Buffett asked him about the second list, “And what about the ones you didn’t circle?”
Flint replied, “Well, the top 5 are my primary focus, but the other 20 come in a close second. They are still important so I’ll work on those intermittently as I see fit. They are not as urgent, but I still plan to give them a dedicated effort.”
To which Buffett replied, “No. You’ve got it wrong, Mike. Everything you didn’t circle just became your Avoid-At-All-Cost list. No matter what, these things get no attention from you until you’ve succeeded with your top 5.”
It forces you to make hard decisions and eliminate things that might be good uses of time, but aren’t great uses of time. So often the tasks that derail our focus are ones that we can easily rationalize spending time on.
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This speaks for itself. You want to get good at trading? Say ‘no’ to all external opportunities. Focus. Remove all distractions. You can’t fill up your schedule (time commitments) or head (distractions) with anything that isn’t #1 on your list. If you want to do this, you can. But it requires saying ‘no’ to a lot of things and saying ‘yes’ to that single thing that is burning inside you.
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