Is Multitasking the Enemy of Productivity & What does it do to Time Management?It will come as a surprise to most of us to find out that only 2 percent of the work force can multitask effectively. If that is true, then 98 percent of us, who try to multitask almost every moment of every day, actually impair our productivity rather than help it – and what does that do to our time management???.
2 Steps to Sanity in your Workload: Summarize and Prioritize
Step 1. Summarize all tasks that compose your weekly to-do list. This will give you the ability to prioritize according to deadlines and importance. Then split your workload into chunks of time. Write the central idea for the specific day. Can you now specify a few main branches for the key tasks that you need to accomplish? Give those a title and arrange them as sub categories of the central idea. Under these sub categories list all the events, tasks, sub-tasks, deadlines, actions, etc. that are needed to complete each of the sub categories individually.
Step 2. Prioritize. You now have an educated view to decide what is important and what is not, objectively. Having clarity about how everything fits together will increase your productivity. You will be able to “find” those extra hours on your weekly schedule. If you created your summary correctly, you will be organized, calm and clear to tackle the main category of each day.
Two Top Time Management and Email Management Tips from OfficeTime
Time Management Tip: Be smart in how you communicate. I’m not saying to be unfriendly at all, but I try not to create open ended “chatty” conversations by email (or even in life). Getting sucked into a 20-minute “How’s it going” can mean 20 minutes less with my little girl at the end of the day. So, limit your use of questions when you’re short on time. Instead of “How are you this morning,” try the equally friendly comment: “It is so nice to see you today!” This will stop email back and forth in its tracks.
The Morning Routine
Ahhh the morning routine. Mornings are critically important to setting the tone for the rest of your day. As we all know, they can also be incredibly chaotic. From the moment your alarm clock goes off until you sit down at your desk, there are precious minutes being wasted here and there. Between taking the…
3 Time Management Tips for Successful Deadlines from OfficeTime
#1. Don’t Schedule Back-to-Back Appointments. Besides making your life unnecessarily difficult, just getting from place to place, this habit also totally squelches creativity because you’re mentally probably already worrying about the next place you need to be, instead of focusing on where you are. Leave a healthy gap between events so you can breath, power…
Having Fun with Time Management?
For many people, the word “fun” is not what comes to mind when they think of time management. Instead they think of it as just another important part of business. But who says you can’t make it fun? We have come up with a great way to track and manage your time that incorporates many key concepts – and uses the best time tracker out there to make it easy: OfficeTime.
Two Time Management Tips to do More with Less and Increase Productivity
Have you ever heard the expression Less is More? Essentially it means that sometimes the less you do, the better the end result. So how does this apply to time management? Often we spend more time than necessary on a project, even if it’s less than the amount of time we’ve budgeted. Here are two…
Awesome Analysis for the Office Pro
There are a number of self-proclaimed “time management gurus” out there. They all talk about the importance of planning out your tasks or not spending too much time on one thing. But what about when it’s all said and done? Just because a project is finished, doesn’t mean that your work is done. If you…
Excellent Execution for the Office Pro
When many people think of time management, they think of calendars, schedules, agendas, itineraries, etc. While it’s true that planning is one of the most important parts of time management, it’s certainly not the only part. Once you have everything planned out you must execute. In order to optimize the time you spend actually working…
Proper Planning for the Office Pro
We write a lot about how time management and OfficeTime can benefit freelancers, entrepreneurs, small business owners, and more. But what about the big-wigs; the people who work in the corner office of one of those tall office buildings in Corporate America? Time management can certainly be beneficial for them as well. As a matter…