Differentiate Your Work Tasks to Move Forward

Don't just do busy work, recognize what tasks help you accomplish your goals

So now you regularly show up in your home office. Great! Now, observe yourself. WHAT do you do? I hate to tell you but checking email and researching for ideas do not move you towards your goal. Only content or product creation will help you move forward. In this post, I will help you differentiate your work into process and content tasks so you can start creating.

Busy Work

Admit it. As classroom teachers, we sometimes give busy work to students. But do you know that many entrepreneurs do a lot of busy work and call it actual work? Let me list some of those tasks:

• checking emails

• answering queries from social media

• researching for new ideas

• finding design inspiration

All these tasks might be connected to your industry, but they are NOT actual work that move you towards your goal unless they are part of your work system. I know. For months, I told myself I am working but my income says otherwise. Work that moves you forward helps you earn more. I started to earn more only when I differentiated process and content tasks. Let me explain.

Process versus Content

When I was a special education teacher, I had to figure out different ways to help my students learn. I knew WHAT they should learn. That is the lesson content. I have to figure out HOW they can learn the lesson. Similarly, entrepreneurs, consultants and other business people need to produce products and services. That is WHAT they offer. HOW they deliver, design and create those products and services is a different matter. In other words, you have to create your own work process in order to free yourself and produce something you can earn from. Remember:

• Process = HOW you create products and services. It is a personal system you create in order to quickly and efficiently produce something you can earn from.

• Content = WHAT you create. It is your unique service (in-person or online) or product (digital or physical).

This is the reason why here at Teacher Career Change, we have Systems Sundays and Creative Wednesdays. I found out that you have to know and implement both in order to reach your work goals.

Begin with the End in Mind

So how do you start identifying and differentiating tasks? Well, start with your end goal but make it achievable. For example, you want to create a reading curriculum. That might be too big if you are just starting. Ask yourself: what part of the reading curriculum I wanted to create can I do in a week? Maybe you can easily create a lesson on how to teach digraphs. Start with that. Then list all the tasks involved. Just list. Afterwards, mark all content (WHAT to create) tasks. Highlight with a different color all process (HOW) tasks. Examples of process tasks are:

• establishing an online store like signing-up for a Teachers Pay Teachers account.

• finding out acceptable image sizes for your product’s digital covers

• deciding what software to use

Do you see what kind of tasks they are? Process tasks do not exactly help you produce something to sell. They help you systemize a personal work system. Sometimes, we lie to ourselves that they are part of our work. In a sense, they are. But they only help us establish a way to sell and create. They are not the tasks that help us earn more. Next week, I will share how I created a work system that helped me get unstuck from busy work tasks.