There have been so many great Tim Ferriss podcasts over the years, but for my money, the episode with the highest ROI per-minute has got to be episode #181, with its 20 minute runtime:
As an mp3 you can listen to here:
The ostensible premise of the 20-minute mini-episode...
Following is a quasi-transcript, highlighting the most insightful excerpts from the episode. He begins by framing a common question he is asked, "How to choose what to work on vs. delegate":
[2:50] I was asked recently "how I choose my projects," what I say "yes" to and what I say "no" to... And I realized that the real question is, "how can I waste money to improve my quality of life?"
He begins by explaining that he likes to have a baseline level of competency in a task prior to delegating:
[3:50] How do I determine how to delegate vs. what to do on my own? This is an ongoing challenge, but a few of the things that I consider are:
First and foremost, do I understand the tasks, roles, todolists, and checklists involved? For me, I like to have a base level of competency in almost anything I delegate... so in the case of podcast editing, I edited the first 20-30 episodes so I could understand how to refine the process before I delegate it.[5:18] To frame it another way, as Bill Gates says, "when you add people to an inefficient process, you make things worse." The Mythical Man Month talks about this. Because the underlying process is fucked, if you add more developers to it, you're just going to make things worse. So I like to test-drive almost every process myself first, before I delegate.
[6:00] I think most problems with delegation are the bosses' fault. It's because the task itself wasn't clear enough in the beginning. A lot of people delegate because they don't want to do the hard thinking. You have to do the hard thinking. Should you delegate because you can give hard work to someone else. So that's #1, I like to have a baseline of competency.
Then he gets to the most interesting part. Once you have done the "hard thinking" for a task that could potentially be delegated, how do you narrow in on what, exactly, to focus on?
[6:30] And then, how do I choose what to [work on vs] delegate? I will look at my highest-yield activities. And the way I will determine that? I will look my to-do list, and I will ask myself, "which one of these, if done, will make all the rest 'easier to do' or 'irrelevant'?"
Because I'm looking for the lead domino. I don't want to knock down 7,000 different dominos that are downstream, and have to repeat that process. I want to find the one Archimedes Lever, that when used effectively, makes everything else "easier to do" or "irrelevant." And that is what I will focus on.
Highlighting added by the author. This was the biggest idea from the podcast with several pragmatic, actionable pieces of advice. It is often true that there are certain tasks on a to-do list, which Amplenote informally refers to as "Super Tasks," that can obviate (preclude) the most other tasks.
In an Amplenote context, you find the "lead domino" by using the !preclude task action to connect "lead domino" candidates to the tasks that would be resolved by completing the task.
The rest of the transcript can be found on the blog. In the interests of keeping this post to the essential suggestions for sniping the most valuable tasks from a todo list, I'll conclude this post with a quick sampling of my favorite other nuggets from the pod:
"When in doubt, the thing that you’ve been avoiding the longest is the thing that you should at least do the hard thinking on first."
Aka the task you have looked at the most time, which would be the task that accumulates the greatest Task Score.
"So what is important? I will look at this list and very often, my highest yield activity will be related to one of my more unique abilities."
Keeping to the theme of delegating: if a task is a lead domino and you're the best-suited to push it over, that makes for a justifiably Important task.
Lots more great ideas about delegating and about finding domino tasks, highly recommend listening to all 20 minutes if this is a topic of relevance to you.