Takeaway #1 - Identify your top priority for each week
Prioritization is key. Companies are setting goals and targets as well as agendas and strategies to help keep them focused towards their goals. And so should you. Identifying your top priorities is different for each of us. I like to work on tasks where I can achieve the most, tasks which are due soon or which are simply important to me.
Spending most of your time on beautifying a presentation that is already good enough, fixing small layout issues, moving the background exactly 13.5px to the left - things which will most likely not be recognized by your audience and most likely will not in a hundred years. Think of the famous pareto principle (or commonly called the 80/20 rule): you will spend roughly 20% of the time to create a good presentation which delivers your key points to the audience and (if you are like me sometimes) 80% of the time to make it perfect. At this point you will have to ask yourself: "Do I really want to spend so much time just for a hand full of people to recognize the perfection in my presentation?". Remember: slides should only be a stilistic device helping you to illustrate your message, not the other way around.
Takeaway #2 - Work on your top priorities early in the day
Once you have identified your top priority of this week, make sure to tackle it first and as efficient as possible. Research has shown that the majority of us are most productive in the early hours of each working day, around 8 o'clock till 10 o'clock. This is where you would want to work on your top priority.
Making sure you are spending your most productive hours on your top priorities will let you tackle them with ease so you can spend less productive hours on less important tasks such as repetitive ones. Digging through my e-mails, booking your time sheets or scheduling upcomings meetings.
Takeaway #3 - Stop creating to-do lists, schedule timeslots in your calendar.
For the past few years I have always created to-do lists and they all had one thing in common: becoming longer and longer with a pile of unimportant tasks at the bottom for which simply was no time to tackle them. There has always been some other or newer task which was simply more important.
Scheduling your tasks will have two main effects:
- It will block time in your calendar, letting your colleagues know you are busy, working on something and not available. Therefore, lowering the amount of "important" meetings on short notice. In terms of working from home, colleagues will also be less likely to disrupt if your Teams status is "busy" or "in a meeting", enabling you to focus on your work with less distractions.
- Always having to look at a to-do list, becoming longer and longer, made me feel exhausted, tackling two items on the list with four more getting added to it. Looking at my calendar right now, I can look forward to a nice 30km bike ride at half past four in the evening or having lunch with a friend tomorrow at 12 o'clock.
Takeaway #4 - Do not cancel items in your calendar. Reschedule them!
Priorities can change. Your lunch date will unfortunately not make it or your partner cannot pick up your children from school today so you need to step in - there are many things that can and will need you to adjust your calendar.
Canceling items in your calendar is simply like ticking items of your to-do list without even touching them. This is something none of us would do, right? You have scheduled this item in the past for a reason and whether or not it will be cancelled, you will still need to get it done. Rescheduling will make sure the task will be completed, just at a different time.
Takeaway #5 - Batch your work to eliminate distractions.
E-mails are asynchronous communication. Compared to a phone call, you should not expect an instant response from the recipient. If there is something important, why risk the possibility of you not looking at your phone or Outlook instead of making a call or stepping by your office? If you are taking on call duty, nobody would write an email if there is an issue which is affecting production, would they? That would be unreasonable, right?
Ask yourself the following questions:
- How many e-mails are you receiving each day?
- How many of those e-mails require an instant action and cannot wait until the end of the day?
- How many of those e-mails contain relevant information for your current task?
Therefore, schedule one or two blockers each day to dig through and to work on your e-mails. For the rest of the day, either turn notifications off or simply close Outlook and/or Teams completely to eliminate distractions and enable you to focus on your current task.