Conor Hannaway discusses some tips to increase your personal effectiveness.
Often disguised as time management, personal effectiveness is a growing challenge for people. The key issues often raised are:
- Speed capacity
- Procrastination
- Inability to prioritise.
There is a big difference between being busy and being productive. Productivity is spending your time on value-adding activities that deliver results. Being busy is not the same. Someone can be very busy but not be adding value. Discipline and attitude are also important. Personal effectiveness means being disciplined in your approach and having the right mindset to work.
Tip 1: Energy
I started writing this article at 8am. This wasn’t accidental. After a good night’s sleep, people are at their freshest for three to four hours. However, people often waste this high-energy time on low-energy tasks such as getting ready for work, or getting out of the house and commuting to work. They then arrive at work, complete their to-do list, have a coffee, chat, check their emails, and so on.
The early day is the time to start writing that report or article, or getting a project plan started. These are things that need thought, concentration and energy. Low-energy times are before lunch and the hour after lunch as you digest your food. Plan tasks around your energy!
Tip 2: Take control of your email
Email has taken control of so many people. When people send an email, we usually don’t require an immediate response – that’s what the phone is for. Take control of your email with these tips:
- Check email four to five times daily at times of low energy. People are easily distracted by emails that come in while working so close the email app rather than minimising it.
- Use email rules. The rules feature is easy to use. It will sort your email using the rules that you set up. Examples could include sorting emails by project.
- Apply a 4-point discipline to all emails. This will minimise the number of times you read an email. Either:
- Forward it
- Reply to it
- File it
- Bin it
If there is further action needed, put this on your to-do list.
Tip 3: To do or not to do
A to-do list can be a valuable productivity tool if used correctly. Here are some tips on how to use a to-do list effectively:
- At the end of each day make your to-do list for the next day. We don’t want to waste energy in the morning on this low-energy task. We can divide the activities on the to-do list into four categories to help prioritise:
- Urgent and important
- Urgent but not important
- Not urgent but important
- Not urgent and not important
- Break larger tasks into smaller chunks and set a completion date. For example, rather than writing a complete report break the task into time-allocated chunks of two hours.
- When making your to-do list, think about what you have scheduled that day. Then plan your activities around that schedule.
Tip 4: Managing distractions
There are many things that can distract us during the day, such as, phone calls and visitors to the office. Let’s focus on these two. We can filter phone calls using voicemail. Update your voicemail message daily (which takes 20 seconds) so people know you are in the office but unavailable. Call people back at times that suit you. Remember, it is important to always return calls, as this creates an expectation that you return calls and that you are reliable. This stops people from ringing back two or three times.
Visitors to your office can be good if you want them to be there. Take control with these steps:
- Allocate protected time to certain people during the week. This means meeting some of your staff at allocated times in the week, Monday morning perhaps.
- Tell people when you are busy. Give them a time to either to come back or that you will get back to them.
- Establish ground rules: When your door is closed, you are busy (except in an emergency), but when it is open, you are free for a visit.
- Remove encouragements to stay. For example, move chairs away from your desk or place a box on them to stop people from sitting down.
Tip 5: Time logs
Suppose you were working as an accountant or a lawyer. In that case, your time is billable to clients – therefore, timesheets are necessary. If your organisation billed for your time, what value would they get for the hours you are there? What are you spending your billable hours on? Keeping a timesheet for a short period can be a useful activity in helping to understand where you spend your time.
As an exercise, keep a timesheet of how you are spending your time for two separate weeks. Measure from the minute you start to when you leave and include all distractions. This tool can be very effective at measuring where you lose time, when you are most effective and what is absorbing your time on a daily/weekly basis.
Personal effectiveness in many cases is a personal choice driven by discipline and attitude! Contact us for more information, the choice is yours.
