What is the single biggest impediment to excellent productivity and ultimately, financial success?
It is inefficient use of time. You know what I mean. When was the last time you wasted time on tasks that don’t directly bring you any financial benefit? I’ll bet it was just today or yesterday. When was the last time you left work at the end of the day and realized that you achieved very little? I’ll bet it was at least one day this week.
What’s the tipoff that you are not working smart? If you have no organization to your day or your week, then you are not planning your success. You are letting the emergencies of the day take control of your life. You are letting the distractions of the day take you away from what you really need to get done.
The human mind has a built-in distraction meter that causes our minds to wander aimlessly and unless we take firm control, we can allow interruptions to take over our day. Interruptions often come in the form of email.
Email is a big time waster. Each year email volume has increased along with junk email, newsletter subscriptions, and social media communications. Many of us subconsciously use email to create a distraction because we are bored, we don’t like what we’re doing, or we just plain want to see who is emailing us.
One way to take control of your time is to keep your email program closed while you are working. But I might miss something important if my email is not open, you say. If you set realistic email expectations with clients, prospects, and colleagues you can easily take control of your email inbox. One way to take control is to let everyone know that you only check your email once or twice a day via a message at the bottom of your email.
When you do check your email, handle it at the same time as you read it. The worst habit to get into is to read email and not take action. That’s how issues fall through the cracks. If an email can be handled within a few minutes, do that. If the email requires more than five minutes of your time, flag it and respond at a later time.
What I want for you is to go home on time every day and not have a backlog of unfinished work! So, make a promise to use your time wisely. Focus when you are at work. Focus on clients, prospecting, and getting things done.
Block time on your calendar to work your Daily Success Schedule. Don’t let the emergencies of the day make you “REACT.” Learn how to “RESPOND” rather than react by keeping your email closed when you are working.
How about YOU? How do you make sure you are productive while at work?
To learn more about being productive and growing your practice, request a consultation.
Loved your tip of the week Suzanne!
You are SO right- there are so-so many things we do in our day that really don’t help us in any way other than lead to a wastage of time.
Email is a major time-waster, especially if you keep checking your mail while you are working, and just as you mentioned, when you don’t reply to the email and keep it as pending, which means you’d waste time once again to go back to it, read it, and then reply it!
Even spending unnecessary time on the social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter etc, when you have work to be done, is time consuming – isn’t it? Yes, all these are important, but if we don’t work with a schedule or follow a routine, we are going to have lots of pending work, and nor is it going to benefit us in any way.
Thanks for sharing. 🙂
Harleena, yes, spending too much time on social sites can be a detriment. I have made it a point to stay away from social sites in the past few months because I needed to get things done. I must say I have more time 🙂
Hi Suzanne,
Thanks so much for this insightful post. I use FB and gmail extensively for work. I also have varied clientele and often find that i am overly stretching myself for completing various assignments. Effective utilization of these tools is a must- else one can indeed waste time and not get much done. Sometimes technological advances can be a real evil, can’t they?
Yes, Dipa. They can siphon time away from what we really need to be doing in our business. Suzanne