Managing Email 4 - No FYI's Thank You!

Here's a tip from Julie Morgenstern's book Never Check Email in the Morning.

Avoid sending FYI's. They clog your inbox and everyone else's and are a tremendous time drain with little reward. Never send an FYI without telling the reader at the beginning of the message why you think it will be of interest to him/her. For example, send and FYA or For your Awareness to keep you boss on the inside track just in case.

Countdown to January 1, 2009

It's coming - no matter how you try and stave it off, the new year will be here in 27 days.

That means a number of things to a number of people; budgets, performance appraisals, sales targets are just some of the items that are lurking just beyond that January 1 holiday. How to get on top of it?

Start by listing all the items you know are due in the first weeks of the new year. Now start to plan when you will get them accomplished. Take out the calendar, look at the weeks ahead. Wow, already pretty packed right? That's the problem with trying to get much of anything done during the month of December.

Nevertheless push on. Book in 2 - 3 hour blocks to accomplish those tasks due in the first couple of weeks. On your list of things to do, make a note of all the bits that need to be accomplished in addition to just getting the work done. Is there information you need to gather? Book time with your staff for performance appraisals? Pull together the sales reports? Now get these items booked in the calendar.

Smile and look forward to the New Year knowing your new year tasks are booked and ready to be tackled.

Stick to your Agenda

If you are in the habit of holding meetings, make sure you commit to using and sticking to an agenda. Make the purpose of the meeting clear along with the time you expect that objective to take. If necessary, time out the items on the agenda to ensure you and your meeting participants keep to the time allotted for the meeting. Keep this a habit and people will be happy to attend meetings that you chair.

Time Tamers - Prepare Ahead

Simple concept isn't it: be prepared. If you were a Boy Scout or Girl Guide, you would have memorized this motto along the way somewhere.

In application to business and time organization, the concept is no different. The more you can prepare ahead of time, the more relaxed, organized, polished and professional will be your presentation and performance. By preparing your material ahead of time, and confirming everything is ready in advance, you will also be able to avoid most technical hangups, forgetting things, or other people forgetting things.

Because you are a professional business person, your dates are already carefully mapped out on your daytimer right? Good. Now schedule in preparation time well in advance. Finally, follow up by scheduling in time, no later than the day before, to confirm that everything and everyone is in place. Now you can relax.

Time Tamers - Schedule, Schedule, Schedule

So often we struggle with those not-so-fun tasks that every job, business, company can claim. If you work in a SOHO it might be organizing your receipts to send to the book keeper. Oh, you do your own book keeping and the receipts are still in a box/envelop/pile on the desk?

Here's a strategy for tackling that not-so-fun chore: schedule, subdivide into bites, conquer.

Start by scheduling some time to tackle the job. Without a Level 10 Intention, its not going to happen. By scheduling time on the calendar, you can at least get your intention close to 10.

Next divide the project into bites, something you can chew without choking. Maybe start by sorting the receipts into months and filing them into separate envelopes one for each month. Already separated? Try dividing or labelling them into your expense categories. Can't find the receipts? There's you first bite: spend the scheduled time collecting all the receipts you can find in your office and put them into envelopes, one for each month of the year. (Try an accordian file and you don't need to worry about labelling the envelopes!).

Too often we fail to accomplish a task because it never gets scheduled into our calendars. Other bits and pieces of our business gobble up the day, the week, the month. If the task is an unpleasant or difficult one and you are procrastinating as a result, you probably find yourself doing almost anything else than sitting down to tackle it. Schedule a date with yourself to take it down.

Time Tamers 1 - Hyperfocus Alarms

If you suffer from ADD you may be all to well aware of the dangers of hyperfocus when you get into a project. Four hours after starting, you pull your head out of the project to find that you are over an hour late for dinner with your boss and you have only worked on a small component of the overall project at hand.

Consider keeping a time tamer alarm close at hand for these situations. Set the alarm for 45 minutes to an hour. When the alarm goes off, get up from your desk, walk around, get a drink to stay hydrated. After 5 minutes or so return to the task at hand and reassess the degree of focus you have given based on your objectives for the time you have to work.

Remember to reset the alarm before you return to work.

Managing Email 1

Overwhelmed with email? Many of us are. Many of us are also concerned with the amount of time it can consume. Have you ever found yourself still clearing email several hours after you started, not having realized the time that was eaten up?

To begin taking back control, turn off the email alert on your screen. Very few of us really need to know when emails are coming in unless we have a time-sensitive message for which we are waiting.

Avoid clearing email first thing in the morning. Having planned your list of things to do the night before, you know what your top priorities are: let those have your best hours first thing in the day. Schedule time to clear email towards the middle of the day and again later in the day. Allocate a certain amount of time and stick to it.

Clutter on the Calendar

Having trouble managing your time?
Are you feeling as if you are always busy but get nothing done?

Check out your daytimer and see what is scheduled. Now take a look and notice what is not scheduled.

Time management is a challenge most of us face most of the time. Organizing time can be harder than the paper!

Too often we book time for those things in our business which is urgent but at the end of the day not very important to the goals and objectives of our organization.

Manage your time - don't let time clutter manage you. Try this time management tip: allocate at least 50% of your day for those things which are most important, but not urgent, and directly target achievement with the goals and objectives of your organization.

Now watch your productivity soar and your business take off.

Anticipation - The Greatest Time Management Tool

So you think everyone has a better grip on their time than you, right?
You wonder why you can never show up on time for meetings, why you are always running late for everything and whether you will be late for your own funeral. Organizing time is not “rocket science” ( or brain surgery, pick the metaphor you like best) but most of us struggle with it. Even professional organizers show up late for meetings with the wrong or no files.

When it comes to time management, there is nothing more valuable than the ability to anticipate an event or events. Isn’t that what our organizers, calendars, day timers, and PDA’s are all about. The multi million dollar industry of calendars is based on the notion that we like to anticipate what is coming in our lives. With anticipation comes the ability to schedule both our time and our resources – like the car for example. When you look to next Tuesday and see that you have four reports due on the same day, having a whole week to get them done is very, very helpful.

Here’s a primer on organizing your time that will help you to anticipate what’s coming up.

1. Find a calendar that works for you: electronic, PDA, puppy dogs, whatever. The size, style and platform are really only relevant in terms of what works and what looks good.

2. Enter in all the fixed dates over which you have no control: meetings with the CEO, annual meetings, sales travel, interviews with childrens’ teachers, your piece of the car pool. Put them in for the whole term or year until the known completion date.

3. Enter in all the regularly scheduled flexible time such as gym time, squash night, book club, time with spouse. If it is scheduled, the intention moves from a 1 (would like to do) to an 8 (really intend to do) and has half a chance to get to 10 (will absolutely make sure this happens) at which point after 28 days it becomes a habit.

4. Enter into the calendar the activities that lead to what you would like to accomplish by year’s, month’s, week’s, day’s end e.g. I will read one chapter of an organizing book three times a week until I can get to meetings on time.

Have fun anticipating your wonderful life!

Where is Everything - To Do Lists?

Are all your To Do lists in one room?
If they are in one room, are they all in one location in that room?
In that location, are they on one piece of paper, one file or in one file folder?
Are the similar or related items identified as relating to each other?
Are similar actions listed together?
Are they sorted by date identified, date due, level of importance, level of urgency, relevance to your objectives?
Do you know when the items have been accomplished?