If you’ve been able to put the advice that you’ve read into action in your life, you’ve probably already started to notice that things have gotten easier. You have more time, fewer decisions to make, and less stress, thanks to a quieter social calendar.
This is great, but you’re probably still over-worked and over-stressed because of your work. Work is often what makes so many of us stressed and is what leaves us with so little time to do anything else. Now’s the time to put a stop to this destructive cycle.
Becoming More Productive at Work
The first thing that you need to do to organize your professional life is to start approaching your work more efficient and productive manner. To do this, you need to stop multitasking. Studies have shown that multitasking just doesn’t work in a workplace environment. This is because the activities we perform at work that require our mental faculties don’t enable multitasking.
In fact, what you think as multitasking is actually sequential tasking. Sequential tasking is when you quickly switch from one task to another and back. This takes up more mental energy, resulting in your productivity going down and less work getting completed.
Rather than continue sequential tasking, you need to learn how to set out the tasks you need to do and then work through them in order until they’re complete. This is where the five-minute rule, discussed in Chapter 5, comes into play.
With the five-minute rule, you need to start your day with a to-do list. Beside each of the tasks, you need to assign a block of time in five-minute increments, following this with other times in increments of 5 or 26.
Once you’ve completed your list and assigned the appropriate blocks of time to each task, start working on your list, tackling one block at a time. Starting with your email, use a timer to block out five minutes, when the timer goes off, move onto the next tasks for five minutes. When you reach the bottom of your list, go back to the top of your list and start again using the next time increment. Continue this pattern until you’ve completed your tasks and are ready to go home for the day.
Removing Distractions
Now that you’ve developed your to-do list and implemented the five-minute rule to the list, you should be able to get into a ‘flow state.’ Being able to get into a flow state is where you’re ready to shut out all outside distractions and work in a fast and focused manner. This results in you being able to do your best work and allows you to get through each of your tasks without succumbing to procrastination.
The number one key to being able to get into this state of mind is to ensure that you remove all distractions that can break your concentration. The worst distraction that you must remove from your work environment is email.
Your work email is the most significant culprit for becoming distracted and stressed at work. As soon as we start responding to emails, we find ourselves switching from a proactive mindset to a reactive one. Instead of tackling our own tasks, we’re working on someone else’s agenda, making it less likely that we will be able to complete the tasks we have set for ourselves. This is why following the five-minute rule is so important because it limits the amount of time you spend reading and responding to emails.
Reducing Communication Overhead
Communication overhead is used to describe the adverse effects that meetings, phone calls, and emails have on your productivity. When you’re on the phone or in a meeting, you’re not working. To help avoid this bothersome cycle throughout your day, you need to try to keep unnecessary communication to an absolute minimum. This can be accomplished in several different ways.
If you find that you are constantly answering the phone, you can ask people to email you instead. If this doesn’t work, you can preface each phone call by telling the caller that you only have five minutes, so you’ll need to get straight to business. If they offer to call you back, just say ‘no, it’s alright, but we’ll just have to make it quick.’
As for the endless meetings that you may have to attend, talk with your manager to see if it’s necessary for you to be present at every meeting. You can start by skipping one to begin with and explain that you have a ton of work to finish and you feel that your time could be better spent working on your daily tasks.
