How do you spend your productive time? There are two ways we use time every day. On any given day, we spend time on low-value or high-value tasks.

Productivity studies have consistently shown that time spent on low-value tasks — tasks that don’t contribute much to your goal, let alone generate revenue — hurts your productivity and engagement and may even lead to general unhappiness and burnout.

“Low-value tasks” are activities that are not essential for completing a specific task or project. These tasks do not add value and can be eliminated to make room for more critical tasks.

These small, tedious activities you perform every day don’t add any value and take up unnecessary time. They can feel like small annoyances at first, but if they continue for long enough, they can negatively impact other aspects of your life, such as your relationships, self-confidence, or even career advancement opportunities.

When it comes to improving your productivity, it’s important to identify unproductive activities and reduce the time you spend on them.

Everyone has low-return tasks. Some tasks only take a few minutes to complete and don’t provide much value. Other tasks are essential but require more time and thought to complete than other tasks.

The ugly truth is, that many people spend a lot more time reacting or maintaining low-value work.

Daily tasks like reacting to emails as soon as you receive them, planning and preparing for unimportant meetings, and managing your calendar won’t necessarily help you achieve your long-term goal.

Others like scheduling travel, maintaining your website or social media accounts, responding to almost every notification in real-time, and research or data gathering don’t need prime time on your calendar. A long list of unimportant tasks can steal your focus and take away from the important things you should be doing.

These types of activities can seriously weigh down productivity. When we’re working on a task that doesn’t feel like adding much value to our lives, we procrastinate more.

Some people put off doing low-value tasks and think delaying them will help them concentrate on better work. But if you keep returning to them almost every day hoping to cross them off, you waste more time than you realize.

The good news is, with just a little bit of intention, you can reduce the number of low-return tasks in your life and do more great work.

The shrink method — starve low-value tasks

“It is not a daily increase, but a daily decrease. Hack away at the inessentials.” — Bruce Lee

There are four ways to shrink low-value work: you can outsource them, automate them, reduce/shrink the time you allocate to them, or schedule them (if you really need to get them done soon) at the tail end of your work day.

It’s a productive approach for shifting your focus to more productive activities that actually move the needle. When you shrink the number of low-value tasks that take up your time, you can free up time to do more important things.

Once you’ve reduced the number of low-return tasks in your life, you can start prioritizing the essentials and figure out how to fit them into your schedule.

You can quickly sort your tasks by organizing them into two lists: short-term but unimportant list and long-term but essential. This can help you prioritize which tasks are truly important to you.

Ask yourself: will spending time on these tasks incrementally boost my productivity, or contribute to my long-term goal? Will they distract me from making real progress?

“Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least,” says Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

When you’re overwhelmed by too many tasks, your brain has difficulty prioritizing each one, leading to decision fatigue and worse performance. Instead, try committing to fewer high-quality tasks that align with your goals and ultimately help you achieve them.

By planning out your schedule carefully, you can add more high-priority tasks to your calendar, regularly track your progress, and set yourself up for 10x productivity. It will also force you to set realistic goals for yourself.

When you have a hectic schedule, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that you’re working toward a goal. To spend your time well and get more things done, learn to separate low-value work from high-value tasks and double down on the essentials moving the needle.

This article originally appeared in Medium.