Productivity Thoughts

Feeling Stressed?

One of the things I think a lot of us overlook is how we work. I constantly ask myself, “am I working on the things that are important?” In fact, my email has a signature line that states, “the urgent is the enemy of the important.”

I’ll grant you that the urgent happens and has to be dealt with, but it should not be the norm. Spending all your time working on the urgent means none of the important gets handled. It’s the important that buys down the debt so to speak, and allows you to make sure there are fewer urgent issues in the future.

I challenge you to take a look at how you approach your work. Do you have email notifications enabled and respond to emails like you’re playing Whack a Mole? That says to me that your job is to respond to emails in real time, and I’m pretty sure that is not what you were hired to do. Do you accept every meeting invitation you receive, even ones that you have no idea what it is about or why you’re invited? Is that really the best use of your time?

These are the very same questions I asked myself shortly after I became a manager. I found myself playing the email game and going to meetings that I didn’t need to attend. Consequently, I felt overwhelmed and I was not working on the things I knew to be important.

Here’s a short list of what I did about it:

1. Shut off all email notifications. They distract from the current task.
2. Stop using the email inbox as to-do list. More on this below.
3. Call meeting organizers to get an idea of my role in a meeting if it is not clear.
4. Send a delegate who is actually working on the project.
5. I implemented a one touch email rule. More on this below.

These steps helped me focus on what I should be doing. I was hired to manage a department and my job is to make sure we are delivering the products and services that help my company make more revenue, keep the services available, find ways to increase efficiency and reduce costs. I also spend time helping develop the skills of the people who report to me. Responding to email as if it were an instant message doesn’t help me, my department or my company. Wasting time in meetings where I bring no value doesn’t help anyone either.

Using your inbox as a to-do list causes stress because you cannot be sure you won’t forget something. Instead, create a “Processed” email folder and move emails to that folder after reading. Create tasks from emails that have tasks in them, so you capture them for future reference. There is a great book that explains how to use Outlook to organize your work. It’s non-cryptically titled, “Total Workday Control Using Microsoft Outlook.”

It’s amazing how your mind lets go of things that you capture for later reference. You only handle email once, and it takes seconds to process them or create a task from them. You capture tasks in a way that is easy to organize, follow and manage. You won’t have to wake up in the middle of the night wondering if you forgot some important task that your boss emailed you last week.

I’ve been using these methods for almost two years now, and I can tell you that I do not stress or worry about things that I may have forgotten. I know that I have captured my tasks and they are waiting for me every day when I get to the office. I don’t always have time to complete them, but that is another story for another day.

Tagged as: delegate, efficiency, email inbox, gtd, organizers