3 Simple Ways To Stay On Top Of Your Work

This week, in a slight change from the usual format, I’m going to give you my top three tips for becoming better organised and more productivity in your everyday life. 

 

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Script

Episode 169

Hello and welcome to episode 169 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

For those of you who don’t know, I help people develop strategies to overcome tremendously overwhelming workloads, whether that is email, client requests, project support and a workplace that does not support a productive environment and we work on strategies to develop personal goals and the more important areas of focus such as your health and wellbeing, your relationships—particularly your family relationships and your financial future. 

One of the benefits of working with so many people in this way is I get to see where most people struggle with their productivity, time management and the overall balance in life. 

It’s hard. The world we live in today expects us to know everything that is going on around us, to form an opinion about those events and to choose sides. We also have increasingly heavy workloads that the technology available to us today is not helping. Instead, it is creating more and more work. 

Three years ago, the main form of business communication was email and the telephone. Today, it’s email, telephone AND Slack. What's App, Microsoft Teams and Zoom. Instead of having one or two channels of communication to monitor each day, we now have multiple channels to stay on top of. 

Is it any wonder we feel overwhelmed and stressed out? 

So, in this week’s episode, I want to share with you a number of tips and strategies that have worked for me and many of my coaching clients—strategies that have helped to bring calm and control to our lives while the world around us becomes noisier and busier as each day passes.

First up

Email. Now, when we are dealing with email there are two parts to the process. Processing and responding. You want to be very clear about the differences between these two parts.

Processing is about making a decision about what an email is and what you need to do about it and there are only four things you can do with an email. Reply, forward, archive or delete. That’s it. There are no grey areas here. An email requires one of these four things. 

Responding is just one action—you reply to the email. 

Trouble starts when you try and do both at the same time. For instance, when you open up your inbox and you see thirty emails in there if you start at the top and try and reply to those emails that require a reply, forward emails that need forwarding (with a cover note explaining why you forwarded the email) and delete and archive the rest, even with the best will in the world you are likely to only manage to clear ten to fifteen emails from your inbox in thirty minutes. You then have to stop and go to a meeting.

When you return from the meeting you now have another thirty emails in your inbox. So that’s now forty-five unprocessed emails to deal with. This number will keep creeping up until eventually you give up and start to cherry-pick your email looking for urgent and emails from important people such as your boss or clients. And after a few weeks you end up with thousands of unprocessed emails in your inbox and now you have no idea whether anything in there is important or not. 

Instead, you must separate processing from doing. Processing only requires you to make a decision about what something is. So you go through your inbox and you clear your email. Emails that require action from you goes into an Action folder. I recommend you name this folder “Action This Day” because it serves as a reminder to you to deal with it today. Emails you want to keep for future reference gets archived (you don’t need complex folder structures today because all popular email clients have fantastic search) and any emails you don’t need gets deleted. 

In tests with myself and many of my clients, processing in this way can clear an inbox of 75 emails in around 15 minutes. 

That now leaves you with fifteen minutes to start working on your Action This Day folder. 

One more tip here, reverse the order you have in your Action This Day folder so that the oldest email is at the top. This way you don’t have to go looking through your folder, you just start at the top and respond to as many as you can before you need to attend you next meeting or whatever else you need to do. 

Next tip is to schedule communication time each day. Because we now have multiple sources of communication from emails, Slack or Twist, Teams and messaging services, most of us need time each day to respond to those messages. 

Now time does not miraculously appear. You need to create it. Given that we all get the same amount of time each day—24 hours—and we don’t want to be spending all 24 hours doing our work, we need to schedule time for dealing with our communications. 

So, choose a time in the day—usually sometime in the afternoon is best—and dedicate it to responding to your messages and emails. 

I, for example, spend about an hour each day on my communications between 4pm and 5pm. This hour is blocked on my calendar each day and so I know when it gets to 4pm I stop what I am doing and go through my Action This Day folder and clear as many messages as I can. I use Twist rather than Slack and Twist emails me when I have a message so I know whether I need to go and respond or not. Likewise, I get a lot of comments on my YouTube videos and again, notification of these comments come into my email so I know if anything needs replying to. 

I try where possible to get all these messages into my email so I have a single place from which to launch my replies. 

Just spending one hour a day on my communications keeps me on top of everything. I might not be able to get to clear my Action folder each day, but as I start with the oldest first, I know nothing is getting delayed. 

Now to your tasks for the day. 

An important thing to remember is your task list is always going to be behind. What I mean here is anything on your task list will be something you have decided needs doing, but has not been done yet. And if you decided you were going to do everything that needed doing you would never clear it because new inputs are coming in all the time. You will never clear your task list. 

So, knowing that to clear your task list is impossible, your only real decision is when are you going to do the tasks. And that means you need to decide what is important and what is not. 

Too often we put trivial tasks on there that probably don’t need doing or are so obvious you are unlikely to forget them anyway. For example, putting fuel in your car. You know when your car needs refuelling because your car is going to warn you. If you ignore the warning, then you will run out of fuel and that’s the best trigger I know. 

Your task list is better used as a reminder of things you have identified as being important. If you have a presentation to do on Friday, then you only need your task list to remind you that you need to work on your presentation. So the task would be: “Work on Friday’s presentation”. 

Now, I know some people recommend you break down the task into smaller components, but the trouble I see with this is you start to micromanage your tasks and that just generates a huge list of tasks that becomes overwhelming so you stop looking at your task list—or worse, continuously rearrange and organise your lists in the vain hope they will miraculously complete themselves. That’s just a form of procrastination that makes us feel better but does nothing to get our work done. 

It’s far better to manage the details in a notes app like Evernote or OneNote. Here you can add your ideas, screenshots, meeting notes and anything else relevant to the task or project you are working on. 

Let you task list inform you what needs doing and what your priorities are for the day or week. 

This way you do not need complex folder structures. All you need is a way to organise your tasks. This could be by the individual project, by contexts—The Getting Things Done way—where your tasks are organised by the place you need to be, the tool you need or the person or team you need to be with in order to complete the task or by time, ie when you are going to do the task as in the Time Sector System. 

Organising your tasks this way means there is little organising you need to do. All you need do is decide what needs doing today—what are your priorities? Make sure these tasks are dated and do a little review before you finish the day to assign your priorities for tomorrow.

This is not astrophysics level of complexity. It’s very simple. What needs to be done tomorrow to make sure your work is moving forward and the important things are getting done? It takes no more than ten minutes to look at your lists and make that decision. 

Not doing this means you waste so much valuable time each day just looking at your lists and trying to decide what needs doing. And while you are doing that, more messages are coming in, more tasks are being thrown at you and it just becomes an endless circle of panic and reactivity.

By keeping your task lists simple and spending a few minutes before you finish the day deciding what you must do tomorrow to keep your important work moving forward, you will remain focused on your priorities and the important work gets done with little stress or overwhelm. 

Complex hierarchical folder structures will always destroy your productivity. 

My final tip this week is to clearly identify what is important to you. Not just in terms of your work but also in your personal life. If you are not taking care of your health and wellbeing, you will not have the energy to perform at your best. If you are not taking care of your close personal relationships, you know a decaying dying relationship is going to cause you so much pain and heartbreak that your whole life will suffer and if you are not taking care of your finances, money troubles will force you to make short term decisions that will hurt your future financial stability. 

I have identified eight core areas you need to be taking care of. These are: 

• Your relationships
• Your health
• Your career/business
• Your Finances
• Your self-development
• Your spirituality and mental health
• Your life experiences
• And your overall purpose in life—ie what do you want out of life? 

Each of these is important but their priority in your life will change. When you are in your twenties your career and relationships may be your top priorities. In your thirties, your career, life experiences and self-development could be your priorities. Later in life, you will find your finances, life experiences, health and purpose in life will become more important. 

However, it is important to know what each of these means to you, how important each one is in terms of where you are today and where you want to be tomorrow and to have clearly identified tasks or actions you can do each day or week or month that will keep you on top of these areas. 

A simple example is making sure you have a date night with your partner each week. Spending some time with your children every day and showing interest in their lives. Or It means making sure you are eating right and getting enough physical exercise in and it means spending some time alone with your own thoughts and making plans for your future life. 

As I said, none of this is difficult and most of this is obvious. The only thing you need to do is decide what you will do today and make sure you do it. 

If you want to learn more about developing your areas of focus, I have a free workbook on my website you can download that will guide you through developing these eight areas. I will put a link in the show notes for you.

And of course, if you feel I can personally help you with any of these areas whether it is time management, productivity, getting control of your areas of focus or developing strategies to achieve your goals you can join my coaching programme. I know I can help you achieve whatever it is you want to achieve by working with you to develop simple strategies that work for you. 

I hope these three tips help you. Try not to over-complicate things. Keep it simple. Decide what needs doing today and make sure you do it and never let your email and other forms of communication overwhelm you. 

Thank you for listening and don’t forget to download my FREE areas of focus workbook. There are no catches. I won’t be asking you for an email address just click and download. I just want to help you build a life of fulfilment, joy and accomplishment, that’s all. 

It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.