Time management and productivity skills are critically important to the success of any leader. How can a leader have time for other tasks that are important but overlooked, if they don’t manage their time?
Efforts that often get dropped due to “lack of time” are: relationship building, staff development and personal development. Each of these plant the seeds for growth and future success. If you ignore these, then you’ve decided to trade your future for what you’re doing today. Think about that for a minute. Is treating your email like a whack-a-mole game really worth more than your future?
The Biggest Enemy: Email
So how do we make time for these efforts that are critical to our future success? We can time shift our work. Email is probably our biggest enemy. I know you’ve heard it before, but stop using your inbox as your to-do list.
- Turn off all email notifications including your Blackberry – they only distract you from what you are working on
- Don’t check email first thing – walk into work with a plan for the day, including time to work on your inbox
- When you decide to work on email:
- Delete what you don’t need
- Act on what will only take a few minutes
- Create a task from emails that contain a task that will require more than a few minutes to complete. In Outlook, you right click and drag the email to Tasks, and select create a task and add as an attachment.
- Move email that you want to save to a “processed” email folder & archive that folder
There are a number of websites and books you can read to help you learn to use email to manage your work and here are a few:
- An article I wrote about why and how to use Outlook
- The book that helped me manage Outlook: Total Workday Control Using Microsoft Outlook
- GTD (Getting Things Done) article on managing email
- Zen Habits article on managing Gmail
What’s Next
Alright, now that we’ve conquered the evils of email, what else can we time shift?
- Meetings are tough to time shift, but you can choose to decline, send someone else, or to attend. If you’re not sure whether you should attend the meeting, call the organizer and ask them to clarify your role and ask for an agenda.
- Reading is a luxury for most of us, but you need to keep up with industry trends, new technologies and techniques. Most periodicals are online and have a RSS feed. Time shift your reading by using a RSS reader. My favorite is feedly. Feedly turns your feeds into a magazine style layout, and is very easy to use and customize in no time at all. Whichever reader you choose, it will allow you to quickly scan the articles and choose those that you want to read, when you want to read them.
- Time shifting your TV viewing frees up time to get to bed earlier and get more sleep, which reduces stress and helps improve your health. It can also free up time for self development, giving you time to read and study as you learn a new skill, get a degree or certification.You can time shift your TV viewing using these tools:
- Tivo / DVR – buy your own Tivo or rent a DVR from your television content provider, and record shows to watch later.
- Hulu.com and the sites of the broadcasters have most if not all of the shows available to view online. You can watch them on your phone, iTouch or computer. You can easily connect your computer to your recent model display and to your home theater to get the whole experience.
- VOD/EOD from some cable companies have recently aired television episodes available for viewing using your cable converter. They often offer this service at no additional cost.
Hopefully this article has given you some ideas and tools to use to time shift what you can, allowing you to focus on what is important. Remember, there is no one right way. Read tips and systems from others and adapt them to what works for you. The only way to fail is to give up and allow others to dictate your workday, and consequently, your future.
Please leave a comment to let me know if these tips help you or if you have some tips that you would like to share.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
My favorite time killer is meetings, if they take X hours most of them can be concluded in X-50% but never happens
I agree Ramki. Here’s a great article, Leadership Without Meetings, that digs deeper into this issue. I think the author is correct that oftentimes people blindly accept meeting invitations out of ego. She said people are often surprised at how many meetings they can really afford to miss.
{ 1 trackback }