Team Taskmaster

The final days of Team Taskmaster are nigh, so I’m resurfacing some of the past year and a half’s most popular or on-point posts. Today, I want to talk about procrastination. (Yes, right now!)

I’m a fabulous procrastinator. In fact, that’s probably at least in part why I chose journalism as a career: Without drop-dead deadlines looming over me, I’d never get any writing done.

Since I recognize this tendency in myself, I’m also constantly on the lookout for ways to battle my “I’ll get to it later” syndrome.

Luckily, there’s plenty of fodder out there. I’ve discovered, for instance, that procrastination is an expensive habit. And that when I’m facing an onerous task, the best way to begin is to start small.

Keeping track of what you’re doing, and when you’re doing it, can help minimize distractions and detours, so check out these 10 ways to manage your time better. Viewing an Internet outage as an opportunity (or voluntarily turning off your connection) can also help keep you on track.

Plenty of people are fans of the two-minute rule for clearing out the small tasks that can derail your larger projects. You’d also do well to minimize distractions, especially when working from home — where it’s oh-so-easy to get led astray.

But don’t forget, while procrastination inevitably involves delays, not all delays are procrastination. And sometimes, procrastination can signal some hidden truths. And don’t feel as if your procrastination is a character flaw; turns out we can blame our brains.

In the end, while it’s great to work on minimizing your procrastination tendencies, work shouldn’t be a long, humorless to-do list. So don’t beat yourself up too much. After all, you always get more done when you’re having fun.

(image by der sich den wolf tanzt via Flickr, CC 2.0)

Oh, you want me to join your meeting for a quick info download? Great. Don’t forget to tell me to build a PowerPoint presentation.

Instead of letting me speak to the group for three minutes to explain the new initiative, make me present a slide deck. With bullet points. And, preferably, with cutesy little graphics. Bonus points for animated slides.

Make sure we take time to futz with the A/V setup, pull the blinds, and make sure everyone in the room has a good sightline. Burn a little time by making me stand up in front of the group and assigning some random person to click through my presentation for me.

By all means, have me read verbatim from the PowerPoint slides. After all, it would be heresy for me to be spontaneous, natural, or (God forbid) collaborative with my audience.

Remind me to make 14 hard copies of the slide deck to pass out at the conclusion of my talk, which has now taken 20 minutes instead of the anticipated three. Why? Because no one was paying attention to the presentation anyway, so they might want to read it later.

Also, it makes people feel important to walk away from a meeting with a sheaf of paper. Let’s not worry about the trees or the company’s “Go Green!” initiatives.

And above all, never mind that it took me a grand total of two hours — building the slide deck, making copies, and presenting — to convey information that, again, should’ve taken three minutes, max.

What a great use of my time and a fabulous way to boost my productivity! The corporate reliance on PowerPoint for all purposes is clearly a wonderful, wonderful thing.

Can cutting 10 minutes out of a meeting make  your whole day run better?

There’s no doubt, says David Silverman at Harvard. He proposes that we start thinking about a standard 50-minute meeting, rather than the traditional one-hour block.

Why? Think about how a day packed with meetings often plays out:

“How often do you find that by 11am you’re running late and that by 3pm, you’ve either been forced to dump a meeting to reset your day or are 100 emails behind because you’ve gone straight from one appointment to another all day long? Either way, you’re leaving someone (or many people) in the lurch. Either way, it’s a stressful and unsatisfying existence.”

How to manage this better?  Think like a student. Back when you were in school, classes were scheduled so you actually had time to get from one class to another. This was crucial in my experience: At the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, I often had to rush more than a mile across campus to get from my journalism classes to my chem or bio courses.

There’s another field that famously has 50-minute hours, notes Steven Levy at No Secret, and that’s psychiatry and its offshoots. Writes Levy,

“According to psychotherapist Jassy Timberlake, the 50-minute hour ‘allows time to jot down any notes that we need to remember, check messages and return any urgent calls and clear our heads before the next client comes in to the office’.”

Wouldn’t it be nice to do that between your own hectic meetings too? Think about how much more productive you could be if you could synthesize the discussions from your first confab before jumping into another.

So let’s take action. Start your meetings on time, and end them 10 minutes early. And let me know how that works out for you.

(image by Stryker W@sp via Flickr, CC 2.0)

What if I told you I had 10 tips that could help you manage your time — without pain, without cost, and without gadgets and gizmos? That’s what Dave Navarro of Rock Your Day is promising — free skills to solve your time-management problems.

The suggestions are based on Dave’s 11-CD time-management program. (And for those about to blurt out that obviously those CDs cost something, let me explain that he’s converting them into a series of blog posts so people can get all the benefits for nada. Pretty cool move.)

And there’s good stuff in there. For example, skill #2 is what he called “Facing Reality.”

“This is all about really seeing where your time is going on a daily basis.  You see, we all like to rationalize how we’re spending our time.  We really don’t want to face up to all the moments of the day when we’re living in reaction and distraction, where we’re getting off track or just plain wasting an opportunity to do something really useful with our time.

“During your day, from moment to moment, you have to face a harsh reality:  either you’re working on the exact things that you intended to that day, or you’re not. You’re either on track for the things that you tell yourself really matter, or you’re off track.  And the scary thing is that the average person spends over 50% of their time off track, doing something other than the things they intended to do to make their real goals come to life.”

Want to read more? Check out his full blog post that explains all 10 skills. I promise you’ll find something that will help you get your time back on track.

Is e-mail driving you mad? Much as we love the ease and effectiveness of electronic communications, your inbox can often be overwhelming.

As a Web worker, I’m especially prone to feeling buried by my e-mail. But I’ve come up with 9 ways to keep my inbox at bay. Try them and see if they work for you.

1. Don’t check (or answer) your e-mail first thing in the morning. Spend the first hour at your desk checking your to-do list, working on any urgent tasks, and mapping out your workday. Otherwise, you’ll get sucked into the e-mail quicksand and your productivity will suffer.
2. Batch your e-mail time. Instead of checking e-mail every few minutes throughout the day, set aside 15 minutes every hour to read and respond to e-mail. The first shift of the day should be for the code-red e-mails and could take 30 minutes. Thereafter, cut yourself off after 15 minutes and get back to actual work.
3. Triage your inbox. When you check your mail, flag the most important items, then tackle them one by one. Leave the other e-mail for your next check.
4. Turn off your alerts, both auditory and visual.
5. When you open an e-mail, act on it immediately: reply, file it, or delete it. If next steps are required, add them to your task list; don’t let the message linger in your inbox as a reminder.
6. Don’t move items from a folder back to your inbox (or just leave items sitting there) as a pseudo to-do list. Write the actions on your task list instead.
7. Use your rules. I automatically route my newsletters and alerts into their own folders, so they don’t clutter my inbox. I can read them at my leisure later, and they don’t contribute to visual overload.
8. Create a contingency plan. If you’re like me, it’s hard to ignore e-mail for 45 minutes (or more) at a time. What if something really urgent has come up? My solution is to let people know if they need an immediate response, they need to call me.
9. Try to end the day with an empty inbox.

Do you have any other tricks for mastering your inbox? Share them in the comments section.

Do you regularly work late, but still feel like you’re not getting enough done? If so, you might be able to benefit from a simple yet brilliant bit of advice I stumbled across the other day.

In an article about focusing your time more effectively by author Stuart Levine, this nugget caught my eye:

Get in early and get home on time.

I’ve never really been one to follow that rule. By nature I’m a night owl, more comfortable toiling into the wee hours than with waking up with the birds. As a result, I’ve always tended to start work around 10 a.m., knowing I’d doubtless still be at my computer around 7 (or later).

But Levine points out that this isn’t always the best strategy. Why? Well, in his words:

“Too many people get to work fifteen minutes late, thinking they’ll stay late to make up the lost time. They spend the first half hour getting coffee and catching up with colleagues on the hot new reality TV show. Once they sit down, they make a couple of personal phone calls, and if they’re lucky, they’ll get in an hour or so of ‘real work’ before lunch. Of course, lunch itself is split between planning an upcoming meeting at their desks and catching up on office gossip. With the rest of the day spent returning emails, they might get in two or three hours of real work. So they stay late, inevitably chatting with the other night owls for another half an hour. But it’s okay—after all, they’re ‘off the clock.’”

These workers leave the office later than they should and tend to feel burned out because they’ve been at work so long but still have so much to do. But the truth, says Levine, is that they’ve wasted hours of work time and and could have accomplished much more.

So I thought about those times when, for one reason or another, I’ve had to hit my desk early. And there are definitely some benefits:

• the phone is not ringing
• fewer people in the office = fewer opportunities for distracting chit-chat
• people don’t expect e-mail replies at the crack of dawn, so the inbox can wait
• I get a sense of accomplishment by getting things done before the workday gets into full swing
• I can finish work at a reasonable quitting time, which helps my work/life balance immeasurably

I’m not saying it’s an easy thing to change your “work clock.” But this approach makes so much sense to me that I’m going to start setting my alarm a couple of hours earlier and see what happens.

And while we’re on the subject…I’m curious about your work patterns. Share your M.O. with me in the poll below.

 Loading ...

(image by papalars via Flickr, CC 2.0)