How many times we have heard or read about working smarter, and we expect our people to follow the same, but when it comes to managing our own time it somehow doesn’t work. You walk into your office and before you could take charge or your day, and decide your priorities, chances are that your work takes you over. You see your mailbox full with 100’s of emails and you immediately want to clear them, because there could be someone waiting for a decision from you.
How do we come of out this situation and manage our day more effectively?
1. Start your day with planning. Create a schedule for yourself. Tasks that cannot be completed at a given time can be completed over a day by allotting slots. An example you may have 100s of emails in the morning and you can check only 50, set a rule that you will spend 1 hour in the morning for urgent emails before 09:00 AM and balance emails will be looked at after 05:00 PM.
2. Monitor where you spend your time each day. Make a note of what you did for the whole day. Identify what was important and what was a time waster for yourself or could have been avoided. Example a 30 mins meeting called in could have been an exchange of five-minute conversation on a phone. You need to ask yourself, do you really want to invest time in those tasks. Once you do this for a week, you would be able to identify where you should invest your time and what could be avoided.
3. All activities should have time assigned to them. You should know when to start and when to finish, this will help you in ensuring outcomes are achieved within the stipulated timeframe.
4. Plan to spend the majority of your time in activities and conversations that produce most of the results for you and your organization.
5. Do not let people disturb you when you are busy with other tasks, avoid ad-hoc and unplanned meetings unless they are very critical and need your attention immediately.
6. Take few minutes before you go in for any meeting/call to understand why you are having this meeting/call in the first place and what is the outcome that you are looking forward to. Post the call/meeting put a tick mark if you have achieved what you were expecting. If not, that’s a learning for next time, be focused on your outcomes.
Remember it is not important to put a tick mark to all tasks in a day, important is what you have achieved in a day and what impact it will have on your organization. Remember the 80:20 rule? 20% of your tasks will bring in 80% of your results. So focus on 20% first to achieve 80% results.
