Stop Being Too Busy
Top leaders and managers know this to be true: Busy-ness, constant activity, is not necessarily productive. Just because you have filled your time with lots to do does not mean you are a good leader, much less a successful worker. Being able to plan and manage your time is a key asset for leadership. Here are a few times to get control of your daily clock so that it doesn’t have you going around in circles:
Prioritize. Create categories to your daily to-do list, like urgent, important, and optional. If you are honest, you may spend a significant amount of time on the optional at the expense of the urgent. Good leaders can focus on what they must do, versus what they can do, even what they may want to do. There is always something to be completed. Consider as you make your daily schedule what you and only you can accomplish, and what can be delegated to others. Giving the right tasks the right amount of time is essential to real productivity.
Organize. When it comes to your calendar, the two most important things to remember are (1) allot enough time to finish a responsibility, and (2) leave gaps to prepare or transition to the next thing, and to rest your mind as you go. So many leaders underestimate the time it will take to complete a task, and their day ends up pushing into their night, or their weekend. If you have a tendency to overestimate, then add 20%, or 50% more time by default as you prepare. And don’t push from appointment to task to appointment without some gaps. Even 10 or 20 minutes will help. If you are constantly shifting from one thing to another with no break, you’ll end up zoning out by the end of the day, and your productivity will suffer.
Emails and texts. With today’s instant communication, the tendency is to answer every person as their message comes in. Review.org found through a survey that the average employee checks their phone messages 160 times a day! Does every one of these people and their message warrant an interruption to your day? Certainly not! Instead answer emails at those break times you put on your calendar, or calendar your email time once in the morning, once in the afternoon. Prioritize the urgency of your communications—let your team know to email you most communications and only text those items which are urgent. And also assign a hierarchy to your communication—if it takes 20 emails back and forth to talk through a complicated answer, that deserves a face-to-face or phone call instead, where much more can be communicated in a condensed amount of time.
Perspective. Busy-ness in your life and work is not at all a representation of your value. Many leaders take busy-ness as a point of pride. But simply having a full day is not helpful at all. Skip your lunch to work and now you’re messing with your health. Skip breaks to work and you’re further degrading your energy level. Too much of this and your mental health begins to break down. Busy-ness is not a good thing. Productivity planned out and prioritized, with a balance of rest and transition built in, creates the kind of long-term stability that improves your attitude and increases your throughput.