Posts tagged E Mail
Find Time in Your Busy Schedule to Plan a Career Transition
Sep 14th
While we differ from one another in terms of the money we make or the things we own, we are all equally blessed (or cursed, some would say) with the same 24 hours in a day. If you find you barely get through your to-do list by bedtime, it can feel nearly impossible to carve out the time needed to find or create a fulfilling new job, career or profession.
Finding the time is possible. The question is: where to begin?
One place to start is understanding why you run out of hours at the end of each day. Typically, most people struggle to focus on their priorities for the three following reasons:
they make largely unconscious choices about how they spend our time;they have unexamined beliefs that do not serve their best interests; and finally,they put other people’s priorities ahead of their own.
Regardless of which of these three behaviours we adopt, the bottom line is that we don’t actively choose to focus on our own priorities and instead, allow unproductive busyness, erroneous beliefs or other people’s needs dictate our schedule.
Let’s explore each of these a little more, starting with making unconscious choices.
Ever notice how you go online to ‘quickly’ check your e-mail and end up hour later comparison shopping for a new appliance. There is nothing wrong with this, especially if your fridge just conked out. Where we get into trouble is that we do not stop to ask ourselves: is what I am doing now a priority for me? Whether the answer is yes or no, the next question is the more important one: do I want to keep doing what I am doing or focus on an activity that is a priority. The choice is yours, but it’s a choice you can make only if you ‘wake up’ from unconscious behaviour.
In another vein, what happens when we let unexamined beliefs get in the way? Consider this:
Let’s say you believe it’s important to have a home-made sit-down family dinner every night of the week. Spending time with family is an important value and this routine allows you to enjoy that. The challenge is that a family dinner every night also means the time spent prepping, cooking and cleaning afterward – activities that can eat up an entire evening. If you examined this belief from a different angle and focused on time together as the goal and not the cooking/eating/cleaning routine, you might find other ways to maintain your value of family connection that also free up precious minutes and hours for other priorities. Say one night a week you order in and delegate clean-up, and another you heat up something previously prepared. You still have a shared family meal with the added bonus of time to act on one of your priorities.
Finally, what happens when you focus on putting other people’s needs ahead of your own?
Maybe you’ve gotten into the habit of instantly responding to incoming e-mail. You keep your e-mail browser up on your computer screen all day, and reply to other people’s requests of your time and energy as they come in. Being helpful and available can be a good thing; problems come up, though, when you are allow what other people deem as important become your priority at the expense of doing what is important to you.
Take a moment to think of time as money; now imagine ‘paying yourself first.’ This means you set aside time for immediate priorities first, and schedule other activities accordingly. In this case, you may discover setting aside one hour in the morning, another in the afternoon and 20 to 30 minutes in the evening for what you want and need (finishing a project, catching up on your reading or thinking through your next career move) and fit in your e-mail around that, you will have created more time for your priorities while still responding to other people’s needs.
These three ideas – making active choices on how you spend your time, examining your beliefs and putting yourself first – can go a long way to freeing up your schedule for any manner of activities. If it is getting harder to ignore the lack of fulfillment in your work life, this is time you can focus on what will make you happier at work, and perhaps even start you on your way to? a successful career transition.
Time Management Made Easy – Four Super Simple Ways to Save Time
Sep 13th
Time is a commodity like no other. We all have the same amount-twenty-four hours in a day, seven days in a week. As far as I know, no one has yet figured out how to erase time, and no one has figured out how to stretch it, except maybe Einstein-for most of us, it’s a finite resource. Yet so many of us complain that we don’t have enough time, as if we thought someone could do something about it.
The good news is, we can do something about it ourselves and it doesn’t have to be complicated or difficult. Need more time? Here are four super simple ways to save minutes, hours, even days worth of time!
E-mail: Change your send/receive setting
When I ask my clients where they lose the most time in their day, most say e-mail. E-mail has become a vital means of communication in our business and personal lives, but it has also become a major distraction: it sucks up time.
In a study done in 2007, Microsoft workers took an average of fifteen minutes after checking their e-mail to again concentrate on serious tasks that required focus. Many in the interim found themselves replying to messages or sucked into the Web (for the article, see the New York Times, 3/25/2007). Imagine how much time you can recapture simply by reducing the frequency at which you check e-mail. If you check and respond to e-mail only once every hour or even once every two hours, your productivity will increase dramatically. As an aid, if you are using a tool such as Outlook, set your Send/Receive settings to your chosen time increment.
Web Surfing/Social Networking: Set a timer
Facebook and other social media is another time sucker a lot of my clients mention. It’s a great way to take a short brain break when we need one, but chances are we spend twice as much time on it or on other Web surfing than we think. Try this experiment-time yourself during a few Web-surfing/social-networking stints. If you’re satisfied with the time you’re spending on them, great. If not, I recommend keeping these time vampires at bay by using a digital kitchen timer-or download a timer widget on your computer. Set your timer for however long you intend your break to take (and don’t reset it!).
Television: Turn it off Televisions should be manufactured in the shape of vampires, to remind us what beastly time suckers they are. The United States is one of the highest-ranked countries in the world for television watching-an average of twenty-eight hours per week, or four hours per day. That doesn’t sound so bad? It works out to about two months of nonstop TV watching per year. What could you get done with that two months of extra time this year? Cut back on the channel surfing by recording only your favorite shows or renting them.
Phone: Start with the end If you want to avoid the excessive chitchat and catching-up many phone calls involve, start with the end of the call in mind. When you want to ensure a more focused conversation, even for a friend’s call, you can voice a time expectation up front. If you are making the call, you might say, “I’m calling about the report/the play date. Do you have ten minutes to discuss it?” If you are receiving a call, you could say, “I’ve got about ten minutes right now-is that enough time?” This tells the caller that right now, at least, time is an issue for you, and if they need more time they need to arrange for it.
