Time IS on your side! Own your schedule; don’t let it own you!
Do you start your day reaching for your phone from bed and scrolling through emails before your feet hit the ground? So many of us do! Resist, don’t let your email hijack your day before it even starts.
At one stage in my career, I allowed my email to run my life. Colleagues, accustomed to receiving responses from me between 5:00-7am and 11pm-1: 30 am, viewed me as an effective, firefighter. Too bad I wasn’t a firefighter! I have worked in environments where senior management established email response as a competitive sport — volley, volley, volley — the one who lets the ball drop, or fails to respond immediately, loses. My email performance, determined by my superiors based upon availability and response time was not good enough; the expectation of response time was immediate -24/7. I still clearly recall arriving to the office at 7am for a 7:30am meeting, and my colleague asking in a condescending tone ‘Did you not read my email already? I sent it to you at 6:30am’.
If you want your team members to come to work energized and ready to perform – they need sleep. Avoid pursuing the game of volley by sending emails at all times of the night and simply schedule your responses to go at a reasonable time, just prior to start of regular business hours, the next day.
If you are responding to client emails at 2 am, and their requests are not urgent — which they are not unless you are emergency personnel — you are establishing a working relationship designed to deliver sub-optimal performance by limiting your sleep. You have to establish your reasonable working hours from the onset.
Leaders need to walk the talk and role-model best practices for productivity and performance. And the easiest way to start is by regaining your control over your email. I guarantee you, your productivity will increase substantially in one week by at least by 25 percent if you take control of your schedule by starting with email. Think of the additional time you will have to focus and concentrate on what you know are the most important actions for you, rather than what is most important to someone else’s agenda.
After your morning routine of getting ready for the day, resist looking at your email or social media feed for the first hour. You will get more out of your day if you are in action mode rather than reaction mode. By that I mean, think and strategize first on what projects you are working on of high gain (your top 20 percent that will give you the most professional and personal return on your time investment) and simply START.
By taking 50-minute, uninterrupted sprints on a prioritized task, you can make considerable traction and move forward quickly on attaining your goal. Use the next 50-minutes to think about people you have to connect with during the day in person, by phone or email. These connections again are the most important in moving you towards the completion of your top priorities. Thirdly, review any due responses (requests that you have delegated for completion) that have been pre-scheduled; you can email a check-in if what you need is not in your inbox.
Research shows that short periods of uninterrupted concentration and clear focus lead to optimum performance. I strongly encourage you to schedule at least three sprint runs of 40-50 minutes each to focus on your top three projects daily. The key is that you know your optimal focus time, schedule it and resist all distractions during this time.
Between lesser-priority projects or meetings, try to insert a ten minute “break time” to do something completely different. Stand and read, go and get a glass of water, do a brief stretch, walk around the block — step away from your computer and stand up; – use the ten minutes as a transition period for your brain and alleviate eye-strain, and it will help you remain energized and enable you to concentrate and focus more intently when you start again.
Email volleyball, marathon days of consecutive meeting after meeting, answering calls in the midst of meeting or walking to an elevator all sabotage your peak performance. Take back your time and you will advance your performance to the next level.
To schedule a free 30-minute coaching consultation with Jenny to work on your scheduling challenges, or learn more about 90-day High-Performance Coaching please click on the email below.
