To become extraordinary, removing activities from your life that do not bring value to your life is essential.

I used a model from Lean Six Sigma to group my activities and help me decide what I wanted to keep doing.

Step 1: Put everything you do into one of 3 buckets

• Value Activities - Things that I do that I thought brought value to my life, such as seeing friends, exercising, working

• Non-Value Activities - Things that I do which did not bring any value to my life, such as news, social media, etc

• Necessary Non-Value Activities - Things that I do which I must be done, such as paying bills, cleaning, cooking etc.

What is Value?

What I thought was 'valuable' is based on my values and what is essential. This is very much personal. If you are a journalist, the news might be very important, If you are retired, working might not have any value to you.

Step 2: Eliminate the non-value activites

This can potentially free up a lot of time in your day. I deleted all the news apps from my phone, I still get a summary of the news as an email, but that is it. Be brutal and remove as many as possible of these types of activities.

Step 3: Question the value activities.

If you want to become extraordinary, are these all valuable activities? I shortened this list down to 7 activities: Business, Exercise, Relationships, Writing, Learning, Hiking and Journaling. I also created a picture of them for my Home Screen on my phone.

Step 4: Reduce necessary non-value activities

When it comes to the necessary activities, do you need to do them or can someone else? Can your children do them, can you pay someone to do them, can you automate them, can you make them take up less time?

This is not something you do once. It is a continuous journey. A continuous improvement.

Where can you start today?