So now you have some motivation and fire in your belly you need to focus on what you need to cut out to enable you are more effective.
Before we get to the exciting stuff you need to make a record of activities that consume your working hours. For a week keep a note of meetings, email, researching, making and receiveing phone calls etc… Whatever you do through the day take note. Whilst this is a valuable exercise let’s not forget that this part shouldn’t become another activity to dread – instead scribble on a notepad, jot on a calendar, take the easiest path to get this done.
With a week worth of activities jotted down take a look at how many hows you are expending on doing tasks that do not fulfil the following criteria:
- Add value to the business
- Move an issue to (or closer to) resolution
- Develop your career
If you are spending hours “busy-ing yourself” by going through email, re-arranging your desk or catching up with the gossip then it’s time to sharpen your act. I’m not saying that you should be rude but keep the chit chat and mindless joke emails to a sociable minimum so that you end up getting your work done quickly.
Meetings, if well organised with a clear agenda and goals can be incredibly useful and help resolve complex issues when the right people are present. Here are a few articles that describe well organised meetings:
http://managementhelp.org/misc/meeting-management.htm
http://humanresources.about.com/od/meetingmanagement/a/meetings_work.htm
http://www.ehow.com/info_8254759_managers-guide-effective-meetings.html
How many meetings have you been to this week which sound like that? Often meetings tend to be:
- Unstructured
- No clear goal
- Little focus
- Poorly time managed
In short an expensive waste of time.
If you find yourself in meetings which are rambling on then excuse yourself – stating that you have something to attend to. That will draw the focus on whether you need to be there and more often than not will get things that require your attention to the top of the pile before you leave. Another tactic would be at the start of the meeting state that you need to leave after x amount of minutes and wonder if items that require your attention could be dealt with first. You find that people are prepared to get to the point if asked and then can go back to rambling once you are clear of the room.
It is vitally important that deployment of the above tactics require you to do some meaningful work in the time you’ve just carved out. If you duck out of a meeting and are not productive this will be noticed and will go against you in future. Ideally you should be able to demonstrate that you’ve done something of value whilst others have been waffling – heck you might even start a trend for keeping meetings snappy.
In short stop doing things that waste time so you can get to the good stuff.
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