Recovering Time
In the February 23rd and the March 16th issues of the Point Lookout
email newsletter, Rich Brenner and the staff at Chaco Canyon Consulting
<http://www.ChacoCanyon.com> present two helpful pieces on “Recovering
Time.” Given that all of us scramble to find more time for our work,
I thought that I would share their ideas with you.
……….jim
***************
Recovering Time, Part I
Where do the days go? How can it be that we spend
eight, ten or twelve hours at work each day and get
so little done? To recover time, limit the
fragmentation of your day. Here are some tips for
structuring your working day in larger chunks.
When we switch from one task to another, it takes a while to get
going on the new task — up to 15 minutes. And then it takes time
to switch back. That’s why fragmentation of your day reduces the
time available for actual work. We get more done when we switch
from one task to another less often.
Here are some tips for controlling fragmentation of your day.
Limit your interruptible time
Interruptions are very expensive. They force us to switch from
whatever we’re doing to assessing why we’re being interrupted.
Then we decide whether to defer the issue. If we defer, we
have to schedule it, park it, or send it on its way. If we
handle it, we switch yet again.
Unless you’re an air traffic controller or a first responder,
limit your interruptible time to twenty or even thirty minutes
per hour. Muzzle your personal hardware. Change your
my-door-is-always-open policy to a specified-office-hours
policy.
Don’t interrupt yourself
After years of interruptions, and overloaded as we are, it’s
difficult to focus. Valuable thoughts — often irrelevant to
the current task — pop up constantly, making focus
impossible.
When an extraneous idea appears, capture it on a PDA or a
notepad. Then quickly resume the current task.
Configure your job
Our jobs are interrupt-infested. The more people we
collaborate with, the more frequently we’re interrupted.
The more teams we own or belong to, the more interruptions we
have to deal with.
If you can, minimize the number of teams you own or belong to
at any one time. If you’re asked to participate in too many
teams, start accounting for task switching by including it in
your time estimates.
Resolve ambiguity and confusion aggressively
Not only are ambiguity and confusion sources of rework, but
the task of clarifying becomes a reason to interrupt
colleagues — with phone calls, email or meetings.
Become a clarity expert. The more clearly you communicate your
own ideas, and the more clearly you understand others, the
less frequently you’ll have to refer to each other for
clarification. And less frequent referrals mean less frequent
interruptions.
Organizational leaders can help in two ways. Leaders can declare
“quiet periods” — times during the day when we don’t phone or
visit each other. And leaders can minimize the total number of teams
in the organization, and focus people on one or two teams at a
time.
Sometimes we try to recover time by multi-tasking — we read email
while on the phone, or text-message someone while we’re attending a
meeting. This often leads to a bad result, because multi-tasking is
mostly a myth. What we actually do is serial single-tasking. To get
more done, stick with one.
***************
Recovering Time: Part II
Where do the days go? How can it be that we spend
eight, ten or twelve hours at work each day and get
so little done? To find more time, focus on
strategy.
In Part I, we looked at time-defragmentation strategies. In this
Part II are some strategies for recovering time by reducing
planning effort and the time needed to deal with difficulties that
arise from self-defeating patterns.
Get help with micromanagement
Micromanaging is an attempt to control what we cannot actually
control. That’s why it chews up so much time.
Have you been micromanaging? If you have, you’re in for a
treat: you actually _do_ have time to do your own job, and
once you focus on it, it will be fun again.
Get more space
Cramped, cluttered quarters cost time. If you can’t get a
bigger office, compress the stuff you have.
Strategies for compressing your stuff: get taller filing
cabinets; throw stuff out; move things to storage; and acquire
shelving, trays or drawers.
Harness the urge to perfect
We spend way too much time ironing out details of components
that we’ll never actually use.
Learn the meaning of “good enough.” Situations change so
rapidly that building for the future (that is, next week) is
often a waste. Do what you’re pretty sure you’ll need — and
no more.
Spend less time searching for stuff
Among the items most commonly lost are: cell phone,
eyeglasses, documents, keys and whatever you had in your hand
a minute ago, until you set it down someplace.
Organizing helps with the documents. For the other items,
establish a standard “parking space” for setting things down
temporarily.
Get out of the swamp
Sometimes we’re so swamped that we don’t have time to work on
getting unswamped.
Give priority to tasks that free you up. For instance, you
might have an assistant, but he or she isn’t cutting it, and
you’re tolerating that. Deal with it.
Stop doing tasks you shouldn’t
Some things we do aren’t really a part of the job. We took
them on because we didn’t know how to say no, or we like them,
or maybe we can’t let go.
Unload what you can, and then deal with causes. Learn to let
go. Learn to say no. Learn to let others do the things you
love that aren’t part of your job. Get some coaching or help
from a mentor.
And here are two suggested by reader Rodney Thompson:
Shift your time
Start your day an hour earlier to gain some uninterrupted time
when no one is around.
Clearing the delicate, frightening or urgent tasks might keep
them from nagging at you for the rest of the day.
Monitor yourself
Realistically write down your top priorities for the day, and
set time aside to get them done.
Put the list somewhere in easy view. PDA’s are nice, but index
cards are always powered on.
If you were to implement just one of these strategies this week,
which would it be?
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