12th January 2012 / Posted in: Business efficiency, Operational management, Planning and preparation, Priorities, Productivity, Time management
On 10th January I gave a 10 minute presentation, at the Chichester College Business Breakfast Club, on what gets in the way of working productively. Judging by the number of e-mails, texts and tweets I received the subject and presentation were spot on. The slide presentation is on Slideshare and the following are the key points from the presentation:
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About 50% of the audience admitted to allowing their work to be interrupted by pop up messages on their screen, pings etc when e-mails, texts etc arrive.
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Interruptions damage waste your most important commodity - time. Once used time has gone for ever.
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Interruptions are a distraction and reduce your ability to focus your concentration and effort on the matter in hand leading to lower quality work that takes longer to produce
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Many people use their diaries simply for appointments and sometimes to list reminders. Using your diary to schedule everything is a discipline and a disciplined approach to managing your time delivers results.
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To start using your diary effectively do a brain dump of everything you need to do - not just tasks, but strategic priorities or the actions needed to achieve these priorities. Go through this list and highlight everything you need to do this week then separate in to two lists for the week - one for strategic and revenue-generating priorities and the other for everything else.
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Schedule the strategic priorities into your diary first remembering that you can’t focus for more than 90 minutes at a time, effectively, then take a break. Make the most of the first 90 minutes of your working day - it’s when you’ll work most effectively (See ‘The way we’re working isn’t working’ by Tony Schwartz.)
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In your breaks you need to do something different. If you’ve been sitting at your desk looking at Facebook or Twitter isn’t a break. Move around. Have a change of scene.
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Remember - successful people like Richard Branson schedule time to look at an action e-mails - rather than looking at umpteen times a day, and also define one important or key task as the priority for the day.
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Electronic diaries make using different colours for different types of task easy so you can see what is fixed and what can be moved around.
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Like any new habit working this way takes a bit of time but once you start using your diary effectively you’ll:
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achieve more priorities - providing you put everything in your diary and you don’t shy away from diarising the ones you don’t want to do
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feel good about achieving more priorities .... and the business will benefit
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be less likely to forget to do things as if you need to reschedule something you simply move it to another time
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be better prepared for client meetings, phone calls etc because you’ve identified planning time in your diary
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be in a better position to drive opportunities forwards and keep ideas on the agenda if you schedule time to write notes after all meetings
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become more realistic about the time it takes to do something and hence better at estimating how long something takes - which is really important if time is money
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find yourself working faster or more efficiently if you know you have an hour do to something - providing your interruptions are being kept to a minimum and you remember to take proper breaks
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achieve things rather than getting to the end of the day and feeling a failure as you haven’t crossed anything off the to do list
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discover if you really have more do to than time allows, thereby putting yourself in better position to evaluate what to delegate or outsource
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have a better work-life balance
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be happier!
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It’s worth spending part of Friday afternoon planning your diary for the week ahead
If you work with other people the business will be more successful if everyone recognises that time is their most important commodity and knows how to manage it effectively.
Click here to go to the slides
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