What you don't have to do
Ambitious people spend most of their time on things they don't have to do. This isn't a moral failing; it's a coordination problem.
Ambitious people have too much to do. This is by definition: ambition means pursuing more than the available time clearly supports.
The question isn't "how do I do more." It's "what don't I have to do?"
The categories
- Things I'm doing because I've always done them
- Things I'm doing to signal effort
- Things someone else could do
- Things that matter less than they feel
- Things I'm doing out of habit, not choice
Every quarter, I walk through my calendar and my open projects and ask which of these buckets each one is in. The answers are always uncomfortable.
The actual hard part
The hard part isn't identifying what to drop. It's accepting the second-order effects.
Dropping an obligation usually means disappointing someone. Dropping a habit means not getting the small dopamine hit. Dropping "signaling effort" means looking less busy, which some people interpret as "not working hard enough."
These social costs are real. They're also smaller than the alternative: being diluted across 20 things and great at none of them.