The 'Ignoring' List: An Underrated Career Growth Tool

Many people that I coach think career growth comes from doing more. More projects, more hours, more effort = more output.

That’s rarely the real issue.

The real issue is doing the wrong work at full speed. If you want your career to move, you need a skill that sounds almost disrespectful.

You need to get good at ignoring stuff.

This isn’t about shirking responsibility or lowering standards. It’s about ignoring low-value work so you can build leverage.

High performers don’t say yes to everything, even if it looks that way from the outside. They make trade-offs, quietly and consistently. They ignore tasks that create activity without outcomes, meetings that could be an email, work that keeps them busy but invisible, and extra polish no one asked for.

That’s how you can create space for the work that changes your trajectory.

A simple tool you can use every week

Open any doc (or blank page) and write this heading:

My Deliberate Ignoring List

Then fill it in using these three prompts.