Time is your most precious resource: You can’t pause it, get more of it, and when it’s finished it’s gone forever. A key mindset for high performance is therefore to organize your life around the highest and best use of your time.
The worst use of your time is not to do things inefficiently, but to become excellent at something irrelevant. This is often the case with legacy work: Activities which were initiated in the past, yet do not serve a useful purpose any longer. If you want to excel, identify these activities and help your organization to systematically and strategically quit each of those.
Huge opportunities to eliminate work are often found in the area of reporting: An enormous amount of time is spent on yearly, quarterly, monthly, weekly and even daily reports.
If you produce reports yourself and you feel this might no longer be the highest and best use of time, do the following. Only create a digital version of your report, protect it with a digital password, and send it out. Make a separate message to instruct people to reach out to you individually to obtain the password to open the report. If after 21 days no one has requested a password, the report is probably something you can comfortably eliminate.
Don’t let the ossified past stand in the way of a dynamic future.