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You set out with the greatest intentions to complete a task, and then you get a notification of an email, phone call, text message or, even worse, a Facebook post. Before you know it, 30 minutes have passed, and you are no closer to finishing your task. The productive hours of your day are slipping away, and you don’t know where they are going.
Here are three keys to improve your productivity and ensure that important tasks get done when they should.
- Manage your time!
Managing your time is protecting your time. With technology in every aspect of life, you are constantly connected, constantly. You have personal emails, work emails, maybe a task-management system, social media, web alerts, cell phones, laptops, tablets and even the good old office phone. Some days may feel like one big beep, ping, and click of messages, notifications and alerts. This doesn’t even include the time spent connected to the World Wide Web by choice.
It is time to take control and turn some of it off – at least for a little while.
To help manage your time you need to:
- Limit and restrict your notification settings. Do you really need to get an alert for your personal emails during business hours? Or could you create blocks of time during the day to go into “Do Not Disturb” mode, turning off all notifications? Could you limit “water-cooler” conversation in this same way?
- Set aside 30 minutes to check your email in the morning. Stay away from things that don’t need your immediate attention. Complete what you can and move on. You can see my article on organizing your inbox for more advice on this topic.
- Be mindful of information overload. You don’t need one more resource, one more reference and one more person’s input. You eventually need to make a decision and go with it. Don’t get sucked into mindless web browsing and procrastination.
- Schedule your time!
There are days when you hit the ground running with the best of intentions and then fizzle out. You need a plan, and you need to form the habit of sticking to the plan. Being unorganized with your time can lead to missed opportunities. As a financial advisor, your time is best spent face-to-face with clients or potential clients. This is hard to do when you are not sure how to accomplish everything already on your list. Something always suffers – don’t let it be the success of your business.
To successfully schedule your time you need to:
- Take one day at the end of every week to plan for the upcoming week. Move tasks that didn’t get completed, putting them on appropriate days and highlighting the must-do tasks that are critical to your success and/or have hard deadlines.
- Take 20-30 minutes at the end of each day to plan for the next day. At the end of the day, look at unfinished tasks as well. Plan for tomorrow, and remember that you can always delegate, delay or delete a task.
- Be efficient with your time!
Remember that the day is not one long marathon. Know that rest is coming – it is the motivation that will allow you to stay focused and stop procrastinating. You want to work hard then rest and enjoy before going back to working efficiently.
To be efficient with your time you need to:
- Utilize the 90-30 rule. For every 90 minutes of work, take a 30-minute break. If this time configuration does not work for your day, change it. Work for two hours and take a 15-minute break. This will give you the ability to be focused and immersed during your work hours with a dedicated and planned break to enjoy some of the time wasters I mentioned in the beginning.
- Separate your tasks into four categories. Eisenhower's urgent/important principle is a great way to look at what has to get done right now and what you can reschedule.
