A Productivity Paradigm

Whether you work 40, 60 or 100 hours per week on your business, your time is finite. The demands upon your time — both personal and professional — are, however, infinite. So you need a way to get more done in the limited time you have to spend at the office. The following tips will help you do just that.

1. Do the worst first

In general, we put off the most unpleasant tasks at work. If you’re putting off making that phone call to the angry customer, having that confrontation with your subordinate or filling out the expense report, you know what I’m talking about.

Postponement destroys our overall efficiency. We actually work more slowly on the tasks we like so that we can avoid unpleasant jobs. The result is we get sucked into a seemingly endless batch of e-mails or end up doing other unimportant and non-essential chores. When the end of the day arrives, it’s “too late” to call that customer or confront our subordinate.

Commit to doing the “worst first.” When you arrive at the office in the morning, determine the worst task you have and do it first — before e-mail, before phone calls, before coffee. When you return from lunch, do the same thing: Get the most unpleasant task out of the way first.

2. Live in your calendar

If you’re like most people, the first thing you look at in the morning is your e-mail inbox. However, writing e-mails isn’t your work, any more than making phone calls is. It’s just a pipeline that gets information from Point A to Point B.

If the first (and sometimes only) thing you see during the day is your inbox, you’re guaranteed to feel — and be — reactive. When you start your day in your inbox, someone else is determining your agenda. All you’re doing is responding to the crisis of the moment, instead of being proactive and driving your business forward.

You need to live in your calendar, not your inbox. That’s where you can track all your tasks and commitments. If you have Outlook, set it to open in Calendar. If you use some other program, get into the habit of looking at your calendar first. Living in your calendar ensures that you’re doing the right things at the right time. And that means less stress and greater productivity.

3. Process e-mail, don’t check it

Processing your e-mail inbox takes time. You have to read each e-mail and then determine what you’re going to do with it. That may mean replying, but it also may mean deleting, filing or designating time at a later date to deal with it. All too often, we’ll check our e-mail on our way out the door when we only have two minutes, or when we’re in the middle of some other task with a pressing deadline. This is the road to the inbox with 6,327 messages.

Whether you handle e-mail once a day, twice a day or every hour doesn’t matter — but read and address, don’t “check” it. Give yourself enough time to deal with all of the messages. The benefit? You’ll spend less time hunting for specific e-mails, and you’ll have greater control over the incoming flow of work.

4. Leverage Parkinson’s Law

Consider the “Vacation Paradox:” Even though you never seem to be able to get all your work done before you leave the office, on the day(s) right before you go on vacation, you somehow manage to crank through all your daily work plus the backlog of stuff that’s been lingering on your desk for the past month.

When you’re short on time, you work more efficiently. You reduce the waste in your work process so that you can get stuff done. You don’t allow yourself to be interrupted; you don’t read and answer every e-mail as it arrives; you make time for focused, concentrated work. There’s no choice, because you’re on the plane to Maui tomorrow. When you’ve got a lot of time, there’s less urgency to reduce inefficiency. Why bother removing the waste in your work habits when you can just stay at the office an hour later or get it done over the weekend? This is Parkinson’s Law: Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.

When you live on your BlackBerry 24/7, work on weekends and give up your holidays, you end up propagating inefficiency. Instead, commit to less time at the office and fewer weekends of work. By reducing the time available for work, you’ll make yourself more efficient.