mind your business: Keep Your Smartphone Out of Bed
If being connected 24/7 was supposed to make our lives easier, the business world didn't get the memo. Most professionals can't shake the end-of-the-day feeling that they didn't get enough done, so day after day they find themselves responding to work e-mails on their smartphones right up until their heads hit their pillows.
Is this a familiar situation for you? There is good news: By implementing a few small changes, you can get more done in less time. This not only staves off burnout, but leaves more time for doing what you love.
When the pressure is on to do more and more with less and less, you want what you do to really count. Burning through your to-do list more efficiently lets you go after bigger and better opportunities, sure, but the real reason you want to do it is so you'll have time for what brings you joy.
You do what you have to do so you can do what you want to do.
It's not about how hard you're working. There are plenty of very hardworking people who aren't as productive as they could be because of the way they manage their day.
Your Best Just Got Better: Work Smarter, Think Bigger, Make More provides tips to help these already hardworking people get a bigger return on the work they invest. It does this in the context of teaching readers the fundamentals of workflow and human performance. But more than that, it provides insights into why we tend to do what we've always done—and how we can break out of the patterns that hold us back.
Read on for four essential good habits, excerpted from Your Best Just Got Better: Work Smarter, Think Bigger, Make More, to help you become more productive and less stressed at work.
1) Keep Your Smartphone Out of Bed
In my book, I tell the story of a client who listed "Check e-mail on BlackBerry (in bed)" as part of his daily morning routine. Note that he didn't do anything about those e-mails while still in bed. He waited until he was commuting to work (he had a 40-minute train ride to the office each day) to start taking action. Then, he said, he rushed through his morning worrying about the e-mails he had read in bed.
Together, he and I designed a five-day experiment during which period he would leave his mobile device in another room and use an alarm clock to wake up instead of his phone. He would shower, dress, eat breakfast and then check e-mail on his train ride to work. Initially, he expressed concern that he might miss the "thinking about what I have to think about" time he had built in to the early part of the day, but he was willing to give the experiment a try.
When I called him the following week, he had good news. The experiment had worked. He was less stressed and was using his morning more productively. This change in his routine gave him a higher quality of life with less stress and increased productivity—one he didn't know was possible without falling behind in his work.
2) Always Be Prepared for "Bonus Time"
This is a great strategy for increasing productivity. Bring small chunks of work with you wherever you go. Then, work on them while waiting for a meeting to start or for a delayed flight to depart. I call these unexpected blocks of free time "bonus time." You'll be able to reply to an e-mail or make a phone call. In other instances, you might have enough time to review materials for a meeting or project you're working on. If you're prepared, you can also confirm appointments, draft responses or map out a project outline.
I can promise you that sometime during the next month, someone is going to arrive late for a meeting with you, cancel a meeting or otherwise keep you waiting. When that inevitably happens, you can look over your to-do list and pick something—anything—to work on.
3) Change How You Manage E-mail
The moment you click on your inbox, your focus goes and your stress grows as you proceed to delete, respond, forward and file the messages you find there. You see names and subject lines and suddenly your mind starts racing; all you can think of are the latest projects, the "loudest" issues and all the high-priority work. If you're not careful, all you'll do all day is manage your e-mail.
Rather than simply flagging e-mails that require action, use the subject lines to catalog and organize them. For example, you might put "Follow-up Call" in the subject line of an e-mail about a meeting you just had with a client. Also, don't look at your e-mail unless you have a block of time to devote to prioritizing and responding to them. When you're going through your e-mail, use subject lines to catalog them and organize them so that you'll easily be able to go back to less urgent e-mails later on.
4) Identify the VERBS That Need Attention
Organize your to-do list by verbs in order to manage your productivity in terms of action, delegation and progress. (And here's a hint: Smaller is better.) Actions such as "call, draft, review and invite" are things you can do, generally in one sitting, that have the potential to move the project forward one step at a time.
If your to-do list has "big" verbs—by which I mean verbs that are mentally demanding or longer-term in nature such as "plan, discuss, create or implement"—replace them with action steps to just get started. That is, pick "smaller" verbs, by which I mean verbs describing tasks that are easier to start and faster to finish. This will save you time and reduce the sense of overload you're feeling.
We all want to enjoy what we do every day. We want to get better and better, both on the job and off, and yet, many people are too overwhelmed to make the key changes that will help them do so. There is no reason to remain mired in frustration and struggling to catch up. With just a few key changes, you can work in a way that feels really good and spend your after-work life doing things that feel even better.
By Jason Womack
About the Author:
Jason W. Womack, MEd, MA, provides practical methods to maximize tools, systems and processes to achieve quality work/life balance. His focus is on creating ideas that matter and implementing solutions that are valuable to organizations and the individuals in those organizations. He is the author of Your Best Just Got Better: Work Smarter, Think Bigger, Make More (Wiley, 2012). For more information, visit www.womackcompany.com.
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