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Work smarter How to make it your mantra in the 21st century
In this excerpt from his new book, Dermot Crowley outlines some techniques for better managing information overload – and creating time to do your real work.
We all complain about being busy. Too much to do, too many emails, too many meetings. Our modern workplace demands so much from us. You may have numerous productivity tools at your disposal to help you plan your time and manage your priorities, but are you really leveraging your technology to meet the challenges of the 21st century workplace? Are you working smart? To truly work effectively today, it is critical to harness the power of your technology, and to use it in a co-ordinated way to manage three core aspects of your work – your actions, your inputs and your outcomes.
Centralise your actions
Most of us made the transition from paper diaries to electronic calendars more than a decade ago. We have one central place where we centralise all our meetings, and we collaborate with other people’s schedules using an electronic scheduling system. Yet, when it comes to the other side of our activity management – task management – most people are still very reliant on paper systems and tend to manage their priorities in fragmented, ineffective ‘piles’. Piles of emails in our inbox, piles of paper on our desk, piles of actions in our notepad and piles of thoughts in our head. No wonder we are stressed, reactive and behind the eight-ball.
One of the most powerful ways of getting in control of your priorities is to embrace technology and centralise all your tasks into the task system that sits alongside your calendar in your scheduling tool. Most organisations use MS Outlook, Lotus Notes or Google Calendar as their email and scheduling tool. All of these tools have powerful task systems built into them, yet few people use electronic tasks to manage their priorities.
It is time to pull yourself into the 21st century! The benefits are huge. You can schedule tasks by date and create action lists for specific days. This will ensure you manage your priorities more proactively, and will help you to balance your meeting and task workloads. Best of all, as many of your actions are driven by email, you will be able to schedule emails into your task list or into your calendar for action at the appropriate time.
Organise your inputs
Once you have a solid system in place for managing your actions, you need to think about how you deal with inputs. You probably get many inputs every day, including emails, paperwork, phone calls, interruptions and meeting actions. Inputs have become a real challenge for the modern executive. First, there is the volume. Where a few years ago 100 emails per day was a lot, now 300 per day is common. Second, how most people tend to manage these inputs is problematic. Many of us have hundreds (if not thousands) of emails piled up in the inbox. We desperately try to stay on top of the pile, marking emails unread or flagging them to maintain visibility of the emails that still need our attention. But it just causes stress, reactivity and missed deadlines.
The secret to staying on top of your incoming work is to treat your inbox like a post box. It is simply where you receive emails. It should not be used as a to-do list or a filing system. It should be cleared to zero at least once per week. When you process your emails, be decisive. Delete what you do not need. File the things you are finished with, but feel you need to keep. Delegate anything that is not a good use of your time. But most importantly, schedule your actions into your task list or calendar rather than keeping them highlighted in your inbox. This will give you greater control over the action as you will be managing the priority within the context of your time.
Realise your outcomes
How often do you feel like your job has become a series of endless meetings and emails? What about the time that you need to work on the really meaningful work? That time just seems to evaporate or get stolen by somebody else’s urgent crises. While meetings and emails are a critical way of getting stuff done, your ability to deliver in your role requires more. It requires time to think, to plan and to work on the activities that are driven by your outcomes, rather than just your inputs.
Many executives with whom I work complain about not being able to find time for the important work. But you will never find time for this; you have to make time in your schedule. You need to proactively schedule time for the important stuff, and then protect it fiercely. You should protect it from the other people who want to steal your time away, and also from yourself, as it is easy to procrastinate over the more complex work that contributes to our outcomes.
To be truly effective in our role we need to ensure that our schedule is driven by both the reactive work that comes into our inbox, as well as the proactive work that we schedule ourselves. This proactive work creates the connection between your inputs and your outcomes.
The three keystone habits for productivity
Any system, even smart systems, need some discipline to use and maintain. For that reason, it is critical to build some simple habits and routines around how you process, plan and prioritise your work.
Processing
Processing is the act of making decisions about your inputs. Every input has the capacity to eat into your precious time. Your job is to reduce the noise as much as possible, delete the rubbish, file anything worth keeping, do the urgent stuff and manage any non-urgent action items in your consolidated action management system. Check your incoming work proactively and make decisions! Stop using your inbox as a procrastination tool.
Planning
Many of us do lots of planning in our roles, but often at the team level. How many of us actually take time out each month or week to do some personal planning? Not enough unfortunately, as most of us are so busy doing, we do not have time to plan. But you will benefit enormously by building some simple planning routines that force you to stop doing, step back and get some perspective. Try to take some time out each month to clarify your top priorities for the coming month. And each week, schedule some time to review your schedule and priorities, and put a plan in place for the week(s) ahead.
Prioritising
For me, prioritisation is about managing the opportunity cost. We have too much to do, and too little time, so we need to prioritise. Every time we have our head stuck in our inbox, that is time we are not working on something potentially of more value or impact. Every time we are in a meeting that is not totally relevant to our role, that is time that could be spent somewhere else. Do not let your schedule just happen to you! Actively manage your priorities by firstly filtering work coming into your world, only letting in the stuff that is a good use of your time. This gets you doing the right work. Then prioritise by scheduling your work into your calendar or dated task list. This gets you doing the right work at the right time.
Finally prioritise by sequencing your priorities for the day or week from most important to least important. Then work the list in that order as much as possible. This gets you doing the right work, at the right time in the right order. Tools such as MS Outlook are seen as email tools, but they are so much more. They are designed to help you manage your actions, inputs and outcomes. If they are used in a co-ordinated way they can give you the leverage you need to stay productive in the modern workplace. Add to that some powerful productivity habits and you have a real chance of staying on top of the deluge and getting to the really meaningful work that makes a difference.
Dermot Crowley is the founder of Adapt Training Solutions, a Sydney-based personal productivity training and coaching organisation which specialises in the smarter use of technologies. He is the author of Smart Work, published by Wiley and set for release early next year. This article has been reproduced with the permission of the author.