The key ideas

Do What Matters Most: Lead with a Vision, Manage with a Plan, and Prioritize Your Time

Rob Shallenberger, Steve Shallenberger, 2021

You work hard, and still the most important things keep getting pushed back? Former fighter pilot Rob Shallenberger and his father Steve offer three habits: write a personal vision, set goals for each of your roles, and plan your week in advance. The book shows how to connect the big picture of your life with what you will do on Wednesday at seven in the evening.

Who it is for

For anyone who is busy all the time yet feels that the most important things in life are still waiting their turn. And for leaders who want their team to spend its time on what matters, not on putting out fires.

If you could build your dream home only once, you would take enormous care over its plan. We also get only one life. So how important is it to have a solid plan for it?

A letter one month after the conference

Amy worked at American Express for many years and kept rising until she became a senior director. Her name, like every name in the book, has been changed by the authors. Somewhere after forty, she began to feel that her life was stuck. Deadlines pressed on her, she was always answering other people's requests, and she never got to what mattered most. She started working even harder, but the pile of tasks did not shrink. Things got worse at home too: she felt she spent too little time with her husband and with her daughter, who was born with a serious illness. There was no time left for exercise at all.

Amy read books and listened to podcasts. Advice like “start your morning with your most important project” was not bad, but it changed nothing. One day she came to hear the authors of this book speak at a large conference in Washington, and afterwards she almost ran to the stage to say she had finally found what she was looking for: a simple process. A month later she wrote to them. Her boss and colleagues said she had become more focused and calmer. She had lost about ten pounds and was working out five times a week. She was finding time again for her husband, her daughter and her friends, and discovering hours in her day she never knew she had.

Rob and Steve Shallenberger are son and father. Rob flew the F-16 in the US Air Force for eleven years. Steve bought his first company at twenty-six, and it soon employed more than seven hundred people. Together they founded the company Becoming Your Best. The authors say that over forty years they studied the best leaders and the most effective people and found twelve principles they shared. Three of them resonated with people most: lead with a vision, manage with a plan, prioritize your time. This book is about those three.

The main idea: what people often lack is not effort but a process. The authors offer three habits: a written personal vision, roles and goals for the year, and planning your week in advance. They promise that together these habits will raise productivity by at least 30 to 50 percent. That is the authors' promise, based on their training experience, not the result of an independent study. Next you will see how these habits were born in a fighter cockpit, how to practice them, and why one entry in a calendar can give a father back his son.

A hundred feet in the night sky

A night training flight over South Carolina. Rob is leading a pair of F-16s at about twenty thousand feet, with his wingman roughly a mile off to the left. The night is pitch dark, and the only thing he can see is a narrow picture through his night vision goggles. Rob calls for both jets to make a 180-degree turn to the left at the same time. At that moment a simulated target appears on the radar by his right knee, and he shifts his attention to it.

But the wingman turned right by mistake. He too had been distracted, by a light that came on in his cockpit, and he had stopped watching his lead. The two jets crossed paths and missed each other by less than a hundred feet, closing at more than a thousand miles an hour. Neither of them noticed in the air. Only at the debrief, going through the recordings, did they both realize how close they had come to dying.

Pilots have a name for this state: task saturation. So much is happening in the cockpit that the pilot can no longer process it all. Without noticing, he starts dropping one thing after another from his attention and loses sight of what matters most. That night, what mattered most was making sure the path was clear, not studying a training target on the radar.

The authors carry this picture over to work and home. When there are more tasks than time, stress goes up, the quality of work goes down, and normal communication is the first thing to suffer. The motto “do more with less”, they say, is a ready-made recipe for this kind of overload, and with it for falling productivity, people leaving and sinking morale in the team.

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About the author

Rob Shallenberger flew the F-16 fighter in the US Air Force for eleven years. His father, Steve Shallenberger, is an entrepreneur. Together they founded the company Becoming Your Best and run training programs for organizations around the world.

All books by this author: Rob Shallenberger, Steve Shallenberger

Terms from the book

  • Procrastination
  • American Express
  • Jerome
  • Vision
  • Mandino
  • F-16: An American single-seat multirole fighter jet, in service with the US Air Force since the late 1970s.
  • Becoming Your Best: Rob and Steve Shallenberger's company, which runs leadership and productivity training for organizations.
  • Roles and goals: The second habit in the authors' system: a person's main roles, with one to four measurable goals for the year in each.
  • Weekly planning: The third habit in the authors' system: twenty to forty-five minutes before the week begins to choose the most important tasks for each role and give them time in the calendar.
  • Wingman: The pilot of the second aircraft in a pair, who stays with the lead and keeps watching it.
  • Night vision goggles: A device that amplifies faint light so you can see in the dark. Pilots mount it on their helmets.
  • Debrief: A discussion after a flight where pilots go through the recordings to see what worked and which mistakes need fixing.
  • Task saturation: A pilots' expression: there are so many tasks that a person cannot process them all and loses sight of what matters most.
  • Mintzberg: Henry Mintzberg, a Canadian management scholar and professor at McGill University. His article “The Manager's Job” appeared in the Harvard Business Review in 1975.
  • Harvard Business Review: A management magazine published by Harvard University since 1922.
  • Complacency: Contentment with how things are, which makes a person or a company stop noticing what could and should change.
  • Blockbuster: An American video rental chain. It failed to move to online movies in time and went bankrupt in 2010.
  • BlackBerry: A Canadian brand of smartphones with keyboards, hugely popular in the 2000s. It lost the market to touchscreen phones.
  • Kodak: An American company that led the photographic film market for decades. It moved to digital too late and went through bankruptcy in 2012.
  • Anthony: Robert Anthony, an American author of personal growth books. The book quotes him as an argument against putting things off.
  • Performance average: The authors' concept: how productive a person is, on average, across all the roles in their life.
  • Preflight: A pilot's preparation before a flight: the route, the mission, the weather, the backup options.
  • PepsiCo: An American food and drink company, the owner of the Pepsi brand.
  • Lombardi: Vince Lombardi (1913 to 1970), coach of the Green Bay Packers American football team, with whom he won five NFL championships.

All terms

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