A Mobster's Guide to Productivity: "Most Important Tasks"

Disclaimer: If you're a fed, the following post is completely fictional. If you're not, then keep reading -- but if I catch you wearing a wire, you're gettin' strangled with it. Capiche?

As a made guy, I hate acronyms. They always involve bad news. RICO, FBI, DA, CW (that's cooperating witness for you suburbians), the list goes on.

Even acronyms that have nothing to do with busting my ass I don't like. SCUBA? You're tellin' me I'm supposed to breathe underwater and it'll be fun? The only time guys like me get close to the ocean is to make sure another fella goes in, and trust me, he ain't breathing. Not for long.

That being said, there's an acronym that was recently brought to my attention that I've actually grown to like: MIT. It stands for most important task.

There's these guys on the web who suggest that each day you decide on the three most important tasks you would like to accomplish, and then spend the rest of the day completing them while ignoring other little tasks that pop up which could distract you.

I know what you're asking yourself -- what type of mobster has time to mess around on the internet? The same type that can shake your hand one second and use the next to make your face look like last night's pasta fagioli.

This particular morning I woke up and realized I had a lot of things to do. Usually our busy season starts a little later during the summer, something about it being too goddamn hot outside maybe. This year it came early, and I've been swamped. After a cold shower and a Frittata di Pasta omelet (my usual), I was able to narrow down my most important tasks for the day to three things:

1) Torch the auto we used for the Brooklyn job the day before (one less SUV on the road - thank me later tree huggers)

2) Collect the vig from Johnny "No Thumbs" (bet a dime on the Lakers yesterday)

3) Sit down with one of our capos and ask why his numbers were so low last week

Great, so I was down to three. Where to start?

I remember reading that we tend to put off the things that we decide are most difficult until the last possible moment, so its smart to work backwards. In other words, take the thing you least want to do and do it first. That way, your most important task out of the way and you can move on to the others which all seem easy by comparison.

Easy for a guy like me, that is.

Following this line of thinking, I decided to sit down with the capo first. This was a conversation I wasn't looking forward to. The car? Soak a rag in gasoline, stick it in the gas tank, light, walk away. Easy. No Thumbs? He would pay up, no problem. Trust me. [Ed. note: I know what you're thinking, and no, I'm not the one who gave him his nickname -- but I've given other people worse.]

So I sit down with the capo and straighten things out. In the middle of our conversation, my phone goes off -- one of our guys who was running a job for us ran into a little roadblock. Apparently, important people don't like being extorted, and this particular jamook decided to threaten our guy by name-dropping the DA. Well, our guy doesn't take kindly to threats, and now there's a big mess that somebody's gotta clean up.

If this were last week I would have taken care of it personally, right then and there. But this time I told myself, "No. Three MIT's. No distractions."

This particular mess would have to wait.

Hell, he wasn't going anywhere.