![\"Competence–preference](\"/article-assets/azioni-a-massimo-impatto/azioni-a-massimo-impatto-matrice-1.jpg\")
How many times, at the end of an intense day, have you felt that you did a great deal without actually making any significant progress?
\nOperational tasks, meetings and recurring problems absorb most of the available time. Meanwhile, the initiatives that could create the most value get postponed or take up little room in the calendar.
\nThis creates a paradox: the level of effort grows, but the most important goals stand still.
\nOver time, this way of working fuels stress, reduces satisfaction and reinforces the feeling of always being busy without being able to devote energy to what produces the most relevant results.
\nOne of the most recurrent themes in management and in managing team members concerns precisely how working time is used.
\nNot all activities produce the same value: some work like a lever, requiring limited effort but capable of generating very significant results.
\nThese are high-impact actions, the ones that deliver the greatest benefits for a limited investment of time and energy.
\nAlongside them, there are activities that are more complex to carry out, or that require a lot of effort yet produce minimal impact.
\nThe daily agenda is inevitably made up of both types of activity.
\nIt's very important to assess how much time goes to each of the two types.
\nThe highest-value activities, in fact, often end up taking less space in the calendar, making room for tasks that are urgent but not very strategic.
\nThis creates a problem of dispersion (time and energy are consumed in activities that don't produce the maximum value) and of inverted priorities (you first devote yourself to low-impact actions and only then to high-impact ones).
\nThis dynamic also affects people's motivation.
\nWhen no time is set aside for the activities in which skills and aptitudes are best expressed, talent stops being cultivated.
\nOver time, dissatisfaction grows, the sense of fulfillment diminishes and the risk of disengagement or of leaving the organization increases.
\nIn these cases, people often look for the solution in more external rewards, such as recognition or incentives.
\nHowever, a truly effective intervention consists of increasing the time devoted to high-impact actions, because these are precisely what generate better results and longer-lasting professional satisfaction.
\nWhat are the high-impact actions in your life (professional and personal)?
\nActions that have the greatest value, that make the greatest contribution to the system, that the person performing them does best.
\nBeing able to identify these actions and being aware of them is the first step toward clarity and toward making the most of your time.
\nSignals to watch for to understand whether you have a problem of time dispersion and inverted priorities are:
\nThe problem rarely concerns activities with no use at all: more often these are actions that look productive and, for that very reason, are accepted without being questioned.
\nIneffective meetings, endless email exchanges, redundant checks and operational tasks that produce no concrete results give the feeling of working hard while generating limited value.
\nThese activities produce a contribution far below the potential the person could express.
\nWhen most of the day is taken up by actions of this kind, little room is left for those that generate the most value.
\nOver time, the awareness grows that you could offer a much greater contribution than the one you're actually making.
\nThis gap between potential and results achieved fuels frustration, reduces the sense of accomplishment and can lead to demotivation or employee turnover.
\nIn short:
\nA few questions can help you understand whether your time is really being invested in the highest-value activities.
\nThe problem can be considered under control when:
\nOnce you're aware of the problem, then, you need to ask why so much time goes to low-impact activities.
\nThe reasons can vary, but the two most frequent are these.
\nThey become part of the daily routine and are carried out without questioning the real value they generate. Without an assessment of their impact, they end up taking a substantial share of the available time.
\nThey don't generate high strategic value, but if they're neglected they cause inefficiencies or operational problems.
\nWhen these tasks are systematically absorbed by the same people, they take time away from activities that could make a much more significant contribution.
\nIt's important not to confuse low-impact activities with necessary activities.
\nAn activity can produce limited value in terms of results and still be indispensable for the organization to run properly.
\nIn other words, not all activities have to be high-impact: some simply have to be done.
\nThe goal isn't to eliminate them, but to keep them from taking up too much space in the calendar, stealing time from the actions that generate the most value.
\nIt's useful, then, to introduce a few distinctions.
\nLean Thinking, an organizational philosophy born in the Toyota production system and aimed at eliminating waste, classifies activities by the value they generate as:
\nA further distinction, useful for framing the problem discussed in this article and for understanding how time is used, classifies activities according to the impact they have on the system:
\nIt may even help achieve a result in the short term, but it doesn't improve the system or increase its capabilities.
\nFor example, a parent who does part of their child's schoolwork may help get a good grade, but doesn't foster the student's learning or skill development.
\nAn activity that makes a limited contribution compared with the potential value that could be generated.
\nThese are often necessary actions, but ones that could be carried out by people with different or lower skills, freeing up time for higher-value activities.
\nWhen they take up a substantial part of the day, they reduce the ability to influence the most important results
\nAn activity that generates the greatest possible value for the system relative to the skills, responsibilities and role of the person performing it.
\nThese are the actions that produce the most significant results, and a substantial share of working time should be focused on them.
\nAs a general rule, the goal is for at least 50% of your calendar to be devoted to activities in this category.
\nThese distinctions help make it clearer that the problem of time dispersed in low-impact activities is far more widespread than it seems, and that its consequences affect the quality of a system that isn't given the right resources to improve and solve problems (which then become chronic).
\nSeveral studies have explored the question of time management and of the value of the actions people devote themselves to most.
\nNewport C. (2016), in \"Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World\", observed that:
\nMark G., Gudith D. and Klocke U. (2008), in an experimental study presented at the CHI conference of the Association for Computing Machinery, measured that interrupted work is then completed in no more time than work done without interruptions, but at the cost of a measurable increase in stress, frustration, time pressure and perceived effort.
\nFragmentation, in other words, doesn't reduce the amount of work produced: it increases its cost for the person doing it.
\nHaving multiple communication channels at once is now the ordinary condition even for medium-sized Italian companies: according to ISTAT, Italy's national statistics office (Imprese e Ict — Anno 2024), in 2024 47.3% of Italian companies with 10-249 employees held remote meetings over the Internet and 76.5% had employees accessing email, documents and business applications remotely, compared with 96.3% and 97.7% of companies with at least 250 employees.
\nCross, R., Rebele, R., & Grant, A. (2016), in \"Collaborative Overload. Harvard Business Review.\", gathered data over roughly two decades showing that the time managers and employees spend on collaborative activities has increased by 50% or more.
\nExactly how much of the work week ends up absorbed by email, coordination and searching for internal information, on the other hand, isn't measured by independent public surveys: the most widely cited estimates come from studies commissioned by collaboration software vendors and aren't reported here.
\nLow-impact actions are increasingly present in every worker's day. Perceived as normal, they take time away from high-impact actions, generating constant movement that keeps people busy, stresses them and tires them out, but doesn't increase the system's productivity or improve it.
\nThe problem of time dispersed in activities that aren't high-impact has four main effects:
\n1- Frustration and dissatisfaction: when time is absorbed by activities that don't let you express your potential, the perception grows that you're not offering the greatest possible contribution.\nA sense of dissatisfaction develops and tends to increase over time: you know you could generate more value, but you can't, because there's no room in the calendar or because your high-impact activities haven't been clearly identified.\nWithout a conscious intervention, low-impact activities tend to pile up and gradually take over all the available time.
\n2- More unexpected events and emergencies: neglecting the activities that improve the system means giving up on building the conditions to prevent problems.\nOperations become mainly defensive: time is spent managing urgencies and containing the consequences of inefficiencies, rather than eliminating their causes. The system gradually loses effectiveness and becomes more fragile and, over time, unexpected events and emergencies become more and more frequent.\nIn other words, you work to keep the system running instead of making it evolve.\nA system that doesn't improve is inevitably bound to get worse.
\n3- Stagnation – no growth: high-impact activities are the ones that develop skills, improve processes and increase the value generated by the organization. When they're systematically neglected, the system stops evolving.\nPerformance stays flat, improvement opportunities are postponed and the growth of people and of the organization comes to a halt.
\n4- More chronic problems: problems that come back regularly are often the symptom of a system that isn't being improved.\nIf time is devoted exclusively to managing consequences and not to removing causes, the same problems keep showing up.\nOver time, they even end up being considered normal and are accepted as an inevitable part of daily work, instead of being addressed structurally.
\nThe consequences of a calendar made up mostly of useless or low-impact activities, then, don't concern only results, but also how the organization functions and how motivated people are.
\nBy now it's clear that time dispersed in activities that aren't high-impact is a problem in every sense.
\nOnce seen, a problem can be ignored, letting its consequences be perceived as normal, or it can be tackled with the intent of solving it.
\nIdentifying truly decisive actions, however, isn't a given, nor always effective, in the problem-solving process: not all actions work at the root of the problem; many settle for working only on the most superficial effects.
\nThe solutions most often used to solve problems do, in fact, stay on the surface.
\nWhen you become aware that you devote too little time to high-impact activities, it's common to adopt solutions that produce a temporary improvement but don't solve the problem at its root:
\nDoing them more consistently certainly brings benefits, but it isn't a definitive solution.
\nHigh-impact activities, in fact, don't depend only on the role held, but also on the person's distinctive skills, aptitudes and talent.
\nWhat generates the most value for one individual may not coincide with what generates it for another, and it can also change over time.
\nHowever, improvised delegation, without an adequate transfer of skills, responsibilities and tools, often ends up producing new errors, requests for clarification and the activity constantly bouncing back to the person who delegated it.
\nThe result is that the time saved is quickly absorbed by managing the consequences of ineffective delegation.
\nNeither of these solutions helps solve the problem at its root, because they act on the effects and not on the causes: solving a problem requires, instead, a precise method that works first of all on understanding it in depth.
\nYou start from analyzing the process involved and searching for the real cause that generated the problem among the phases of the process, and then identify the practical solution that fills the gap at the origin of the problem.
\nThe method for solving a problem (business or personal) doesn't stop at the better-known problem solving.
\nA problem has to be understood through in-depth analysis: the more useful details you have about the problem, the more the solution will emerge almost on its own and the easier it will be to apply.
\nEven before analysis, in fact, comes the fundamental skill of noticing problems: if a problem isn't even seen, how can it be solved?\nAnd it isn't only necessary to learn to see all the problems, but also and above all to put them in the right hierarchy.
\nThat's exactly why Prodability Academy created an online course to develop this skill: \"Problem Noting - Fai ordine nei tuoi problemi\", to learn how to see, write down and correctly order the problems of a system.
\nThe program lets you become autonomous and independent in detecting your company's problems, defining them precisely and putting them in order of priority.
\nSo the right sequence of skills for solving a problem is: problem noting, problem analysis, problem solving.
\nThe analysis of a problem focuses on the phases of the process involved, to identify the exact moment at which the real cause of the problem is generated.
\nIn the case of the problem discussed here, the phases of the process involved to analyze are:
\nThis article looks in depth at the phase of periodic analysis of your personal job description.
\nEvery year, in fact, it's important to stop and carefully analyze your personal job description, so as to identify which tasks are performed at low impact and which at high impact, while also asking how they have changed over time and in relation to the skills you've acquired.
\nIn the periodic analysis of the job description, there's no classification of your own tasks.
\nThe job description is often treated as a simple list of activities to perform, without a classification based on the impact each of them produces.
\nUnderlying this is often a mindset problem that leads people to consider all tasks as equivalent, differentiating them only by content or by the time they require.
\nIn reality, every organization has a natural hierarchy: some activities can be carried out effectively by many people, while others require skills, experience, decision-making ability or a big-picture view that belong to a much smaller number of individuals.
\nA person's value within an organization doesn't depend on how many activities they perform, but on their ability to carry out the ones few others could perform as effectively. These are precisely the high-impact activities.
\nFor this reason, tasks don't all have the same strategic importance either.
\nSome, if they aren't performed by the person with the most suitable skills, significantly compromise the system's ability to generate value.
\nOthers, while necessary, can be assigned to other people without reducing the organization's overall performance.
\nThe goal of analyzing the job description, then, is to clearly identify which activities represent an irreplaceable contribution to the system and to make sure that a significant share of time is devoted to them.
\nIf the real cause of the problem is something missing, the solution that solves it is whatever fills that gap: what's missing?
\nA tool (asset) to apply to the analysis of the job description, to produce a correct classification of your tasks.
\nA two-parameter matrix that helps you assess your tasks and classify the high-impact ones (to be strengthened) and the zero- or low-impact ones (to be reduced or eliminated).
\nHere are two example matrices, an extremely practical and clarifying operational tool.
\nTo identify high-impact activities more precisely, it can be useful to classify each task according to two fundamental parameters:
\n
Crossing these two factors lets you classify tasks and understand more clearly which activities you should focus your time on.
\nThe matrix isn't meant to establish which activities are important in an absolute sense, but to identify those that, at a specific moment and for a given person, allow them to generate the most value for the organization.
\nHigh-impact activities are those that combine high competence and high preference, because it's precisely this combination that lets you express your full potential.
\nA second classification of your tasks can consider the value they generate and how difficult it is to transfer them to other people.
\nThe two parameters, then, are:
\n![\"Value–delegation](\"/article-assets/azioni-a-massimo-impatto/azioni-a-massimo-impatto-matrice-2.jpg\")
This matrix highlights an important principle: the goal isn't to delegate everything, but to focus your time on the high-value activities that are still difficult to transfer to others.
\nAt the same time, it's useful to work so that these activities, too, gradually become delegable, through training, process standardization and developing team members' skills.
\nThe matrix produces the best results when it's filled in concretely, entering at least two tasks in each quadrant.
\nThe exercise can be done both for your own role and together with team members, so as to make it evident that not all activities generate the same value and not all require the same skills.
\nThe analysis can be applied in different contexts:
\nThe goal isn't to classify people, but to classify tasks.
\nIt's precisely this distinction that makes it possible to make more effective decisions about how work is organized.
\nIn short, the first step in solving the problem of time dispersed in activities that aren't high-impact is classifying your tasks. Without a clear identification of high-impact activities, the risk is filling your calendar with low-impact activities or, in the worst cases, with activities that have no value at all.
\nSimply being aware of which activities generate the greatest contribution already produces a change: it becomes easier to recognize them, protect their space in the calendar and devote a growing share of your time to them.
\nAt the same time, the classification makes it clear which activities can be delegated or redesigned, allowing you to focus energy and skills on the actions that produce the most value for the person and for the whole system.
\nEvery problem (even the most hidden one) can be solved for good by adopting a method that starts from problem noting, goes through the analysis of cause and process, and culminates in an operational solution.
\nNewport, C. (2016) – Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World
\nMark, G., Gudith, D., & Klocke, U. (2008) – The cost of interrupted work: more speed and stress, Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’08), ACM — https://doi.org/10.1145/1357054.1357072
\nISTAT (2025) – Imprese e Ict — Anno 2024, press release of January 17, 2025 — https://www.istat.it/comunicato-stampa/imprese-e-ict-anno-2024/
\nCross, R., Rebele, R., & Grant, A. (2016) – Collaborative Overload (Harvard Business Review)
","headings":[{"level":2,"text":"How the problem of time spent on non-priority activities shows up","id":"how-the-problem-of-time-spent-on-non-priority-activities-shows-up"},{"level":2,"text":"What are the signs that the problem is present?","id":"what-are-the-signs-that-the-problem-is-present"},{"level":2,"text":"What evidence shows the problem is absent?","id":"what-evidence-shows-the-problem-is-absent"},{"level":2,"text":"What the research says","id":"what-the-research-says"},{"level":2,"text":"What the effects of the problem are","id":"what-the-effects-of-the-problem-are"},{"level":2,"text":"The most common mistakes in solving the problem","id":"the-most-common-mistakes-in-solving-the-problem"},{"level":2,"text":"Where to look for the cause of the problem: analyzing the process involved","id":"where-to-look-for-the-cause-of-the-problem-analyzing-the-process-involved"},{"level":2,"text":"Identify the real cause of the problem","id":"identify-the-real-cause-of-the-problem"},{"level":2,"text":"The operational solution","id":"the-operational-solution"},{"level":3,"text":"The competence–preference matrix","id":"the-competencepreference-matrix"},{"level":3,"text":"The value – delegation difficulty matrix","id":"the-value--delegation-difficulty-matrix"},{"level":2,"text":"Sources and references","id":"sources-and-references"}],"tldr":"","tldrItems":null}