Another week is almost over. I hope you can look back and say to yourself, “That was a good, a productive week, and I even had enough time for my family and friends.” So far we have learned that a stronger focus does help you being more productive, which in turn helps you being able to spend more time with fun things.
Now a question,
“Do you already have an outline for a plan of actions for the upcoming week?”
Today's lecture deals with that,
“Priorities and Planning”.
Priorities for your tasks should be derived from the impact areas that I have talked about
in my time management and productivity article last week.
A short reminder: You should assign a time slot of one (1) hour each week to assess the status of each of your impact areas and define actions for further improvement during the following week. In a large corporation you will go into meetings with your team, in a small home office situation you analyze your stats by yourself.
The advantage about focusing on impact areas is that you are less likely to miss something.
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Last week I introduced the “
Touch It - Do It - concept for more productivity.” It basically requires that you stay focused and complete a task, once you have started working on it. No more task switching! It always takes ( = wastes ) some time to get tuned in for the current task in front of you. Don't switch it. Start and complete it. Then the next one, and the next one, etc.
But how to deal with all the interruptions during the day?
The phone rings, a co-worker comes into my office, …
If it happens that you work in your home office, your kids or your wife may come in, … How are you dealing with it or how should you deal with this?
When you are reading articles from successful business people, artists, managers you quickly see that they value their time highly and
don't allow interruptions. They have certain time slots during the day, when they don't pick up the phone and have the door to their office closed.
Some may have 1 hour, some even 4 or 5 hours depending on the kind of work they do. They only deal with the most important tasks of their business. This is not limited to business it could also be the daily training for an athlete, or practicing for a musician.
The secrets of not getting interrupted are:
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How many times do you think did the following happen to you?
You think about something like getting more traffic to your Web site, or finally writing an article. Then you start doing it, but next you bail out at the first opportunity. You stop and do something else. You dig even deeper into the next task just to create an excuse and gain confidence that you are doing the right thing.
Most likely this next task is more enjoyable and less important at the same time. You get it done, but you don't achieve as much, when you repeatedly put off more important tasks.
The more often you put off the “first” task, the more difficult it will become next time and instead of working on it, you probably start to look for another “less important” task right away.
Does this sound familiar to you?
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