Time is precious. We all know it, but not all of us make the most out of it. We live in an era in which we wish there were more than 24 hours a day in order to do everything we want to do, and the words “overwhelmed” and “stress” prevail in our daily vocabulary. And this affects both our personal and professional life. The problem is that, in our work, the fact of not delivering something in time or extending working hours more than we should takes a toll as far as our image in the company and our performance are concerned. Let’s face it: nobody teaches us how to work. That is why it is important to learn how to work in a smart way, and this requires acquiring and keeping good habits. A task that is so easy and so difficult at the same time.
Tasks and Planning
Our working day depends on two critical factors: our tasks and their planning. It is not about doing many things, but about getting the best results possible. Often, at the end of a workday, we have the feeling that we have not tackled that many tasks, despite not having stopped working all day. In this sense, it is essential to apply the 80-20 rule: getting 80% of results with 20% of the tasks. Each task requires a different amount of time and effort, so the difficulty lies in correctly choosing that 20%. To do this, we should order them from most to least important: first projects and high-value tasks, then supplementary and repetitive tasks, and finally, micro-tasks and emergencies.
The bad news is that most of the times, we order the list upside down.
We let ourselves be interrupted by emergencies that are not real emergencies, we waste a precious time performing micro-tasks (e.g. answering emails) and, at the end of the day, just when we perform worse, we tackle the most important projects.
So, how can we solve this problem? By planning tasks the day before. Before finishing our working day, we should reserve 15 minutes to plan the work of the next day. Ideally, we should start the day by tackling the most important task. Depending on our time and energy, we can carry out supplementary and repetitive tasks. Micro-tasks should be dealt with as soon as they come up. Unfortunately, it is impossible to plan emergencies, but we make sure to be prepared.
Our working day should actually start with the most important task, because in the first two hours of the morning, we are more clearheaded, less absentminded, perform better and obtain productive results from the very first moment. In a society full of professional “procrastinators”, it is vital to reverse our natural tendency and to avoid postponing the key tasks of our work.
With regard to designing our “map” of smart work, this requires applying six habits:
- Pay attention to deadlines. All tasks must have a deadline. If they do not have one, then someone should define a deadline or you should ask for it.
- Bear in mind that other people may need something from you to be able do their job.
- If there is a huge task, divide it into sub-tasks.
- Before leaving, make sure that the next day’s first task is ready to be tackled.
- Apply the “golden minute” rule: if you have something on your to-do list that only takes one or two minutes to complete (writing an short email, making a quick call, etc.), do it on the go instead of accumulating these tiny tasks for the end of the day. This is especially applicable to micro-tasks.
- Spend more time actually finishing up tasks. This means that you should not be working on too many fronts at the same time. Ideally, you should finish off your work as soon as you have the opportunity to do so, and if this opportunity does not arise, then look for it.
Our Greatest Enemies
Our greatest enemies at work are distractions and interruptions, because they steal away our most valuable asset at work: our attention. Usually, we cannot differentiate distractions from interruptions, which is why we first need to understand our enemies well before we can fight them.
Distractions are our fault; moments of lack of concentration that we ourselves are causing. But there is no need for panic: precisely because we ourselves are the cause, it is within our power to find a solution, by means of good personal habits: closing the email program when we need maximum concentration, setting the mobile phone in silent mode or putting it away, and closing any computer programs we do not need.
Our thirst for multitasking also reduces the quality of our work. We constantly go from one task to the other and even boast about it, but the lesser attention that is given to our work, the lesser the quality. What can we do not to fall into multitasking? Divide tasks into several parts to be able to take them up again after an interruption, and always have a note pad at hand to take notes so that you do not need to memorize things.
The other great enemy is called “interruptions”. Interruptions are unforeseen issues that do not depend on us: they are imposed on us. The good news is that there is a way to deal with them and the key factor is to be able to distinguish between “unforeseen events” and “emergencies”. In most modern companies, it seems that emergencies arise always and spontaneously: everything is urgent and everybody wants everything for yesterday. But not everything is urgent and emergencies are not always emergencies. An unforeseen task is something unexpected, but of relative importance, that we can address whenever we find some time. A true emergency is something unexpected and very important that forces us to stop what we are doing to address the emergency at once.
For this reason, it is essential that we do not exaggerate the importance of the matter or let ourselves get carried away with the “pizza maker syndrome” (i.e. when the last order is the most important one). Instead, we should spend no more than a couple of minutes thinking about it, avoid making a big deal out of it and consider its real importance. Once we decide whether it is an unforeseen event or an emergency, we can take measures. If it is an unforeseen event, then we should first finish our key tasks. If it is an emergency, then we must readjust our work schedule to be able to start working on the task as soon as possible.
It seems we have many things to change in the way we work. For companies, document output management solutions are a good way of starting the change, since they allow automating and planning tasks efficiently.
In conclusion, it is clear that the work habits from a decade ago are no longer valid today. However, it is not a good idea to try to change everything at once. We should go step by step, until we feel that we are capable of running the true “productivity marathon”.
André Klein
Freelance Consultant for DocPath