How to make better use of your time.

Technology advancements are supposed to make our business life easier right? Well, that’s the idea but reality is that most of us are constantly interrupted by all sorts of different distractions.

I’m a very organized person, and I do layout my days and weeks in a very structured way. It might look a little bit paranoid at first, but if you checkout my schedule you won’t find much wasted time.

So to protect what I consider a “very best practice”, I have developed a simple dashboard that I use to indicate to people what to expect when trying to reach me. It’s easy to use, take a look:

Don’t be fooled by all the “real time” flags in the chart. In fact, for each of the listed channels, I developed a set of policies to protect my day from intrusions and time-wasters.

PHONE: voice calls.

• If I don’t recognize the number on the display, I won’t answer the phone.
• If the caller id is hidden, I won’t answer the call.
• If I’m busy doing something else, I won’t answer the call.

PHONE: text messages (SMS)

• I read SMS pretty much in real time, even if I don’t recognize the caller.
• However I almost never reply in real time unless it’s some personal message or emergency.

IM

• At work I use MS Outlook and Communicator, but I don’t synchronize the status between the twos.
• I believe this setup provides more flexibility: should I move some Outlook Calendar meetings during the day I don’t have to worry about Communicator accurately reflecting the change (and sometimes it just doesn’t).
• I always set my IM status as busy, but I usually reply pretty quick if you ask me nicely, even if I’m busy doing something else. Way faster than a lot of people I know that are “available” on IM all the time, anyway…

EMAIL

• Contrary to popular corporate belief, email IS NOT a real time tool. Hence I don’t do real time emails.
• I download emails three/four times per day from the server to my PC, then I just set Outlook to offline.
• I sort them by sender, topic and date, and then I work my way through.
• I usually have next to zero unread emails from one week to the next.
• I do use fast reading and skim-reading, and I file by sender and by organization.
• I used to file by topic too, but I found that it’s much easier for me to remember who sent me something rather than remembering the subject.

So how do I wrap up all of the above practices into a sensible working day approach?

As an example, here’s one of my typical week days.

7 am – morning shower/shave: think about something creative. (e.g. how to do specific jobs or tasks differently, how the team could work in an innovative way). Usually high level big picture stuff to get my brain going.

Breakfast: read online news (RSS based) for 10 minutes, occasionally tweet interesting stuff if I find any.

(home) Office: first thing in the morning I spend 30 minutes to download, check, sort and prioritize emails. I reply to any email that is REALLY urgent (remember that’s urgent according to my judgement, not yours). Then I look at my schedule and go through the tasks I set to myself for the day:

• Long/difficult/articulated tasks = max 2 per day
• Short/simple tasks = max 2 in the morning + 2 in the afternoon.

Take phone calls only if the caller is someone I know won’t waste my time, otherwise I engage voice mail and sort at lunch time.

At around 12 I download/check email again, re-sort and re-prioritize. Reply to urgent ones.

Lunch break is 30 minutes for food, 15 minutes for brief walk whilst sorting voice mail.

Afternoon: spend 30 minutes to think about big picture things (refreshing early morning pondering or new ones). Call back people who left voice mail, go through the list of tasks for the rest of the day.

At around 6 pm I download/check email again, sort and re-prioritize. Check voice mail again. Go home.

Evening: dinner and quality time with family, occasional trip to shops (not often!).

Night: rework and finalize task list for next day. Occasionally download/check email again around 10 pm. Sort, prioritize, answer some.

Retire to my living room by 10.30 pm, read/watch film or sport (occasionally).

Go to bed at around 12.

As you can see there are no secrets or magic shortcuts to make time, just establish a solid schedule and adopt enough discipline to stick to tasks and practices.  What do you think, could it work for you too?

Let me know your thoughts and of course recommend improvements.

Advertisement