7 Productive And No Stress Routines For Success
August 28, 2009
Time is my most valuable commodity, I make conscious effort not to waste it. This is one thing you do not have a second chance with, and one which you have no control over. The clock just goes on ticking whether you make the most of your time or not. So I decide to use time the way I want to and not let it pass by without me accomplishing what I want during my time on planet earth.
Now if you want to be efficient and productive, you want to save time for work that only you can do. Work that can be automated or outsourced, should be set up for automation and outsourcing. You want to be dispensable to your business so you have time freedom ad go on small breaks, or take vacations.
Some simple things you can do to automate your work
Filters to take care of your junk and unimportant emails – you only spend time going through mails that matter to you. All the rest are automatically sent into appropriate folders or deleted. It’s like having a virtual assistant filtering mails for you.
Set up voice mails for your phones so you don’t feel compelled to respond to calls as and when they come in. Only check voice mails periodically so you can concentrate on your work. 28% of you daily time is spent on unnecessary interruptions and “recovery time” to get back to the groove of work.
Design your filing system (on and offline) – so you not only keep and save your documents and files but more importantly that you can retrieve them with ease when you need them. How much time do you spend looking for things you know you have?
Leave it the way you find it. Once you have a system, maintain the order, and religiously put files and documents where they are meant to be kept so you don’t have to spend time looking for them when you next need them. This routine applies whether it is your stationery, socks, shoes, bags, keys or glasses.
15% of your time is spent in searching for information and an estimated 50% of all searches fail. You either have to redo your work or buy new items when you cannot find them. That is a huge waste of time and resource. So leave it the way you find it and observe this ceremoniously.
Develop the discipline to touch things once, process them or delete them, or else do not touch them until you have the time. If you start processing something (a mail or a request) and the decide to come back to it because you don’t have all the information, then I suggest you look for the information now. If you leave the processing till later then you have to remember to do it at a later time. You may forget and then you need to spend time tuning in again to work on the same stuff. Maintain that one touch system.
Plan your work, your household chores and develop a routine that works best for you. This cuts out downtime spent in agonizingly indecisive moments over the multitude of choices you have every day. Make sure you do a onetime planning that takes into consideration all that you need to do (from marketing to production), when you do, how you do and then follow that plan
Form your routine muscles - religiously follow your plan and repeat until you form a habit and your body goes on auto pilot. If it makes sense to pick up grocery on a certain on the way home and do that. Do not change your schedule. That will throw things off and you may forget certain things. When you do the routine regularly enough these habits will be built into your muscles and you will not need to consciously think about them. You free your mind up as you body goes on auto pilot – efficient and clean. Your body will take that path that has now become automatic.
If you find this helpful then tune in for more productivity and stress relief tips by signing up here – if you are not already on my newsletter list. Details of the special 24-hour sale on Aug 30th 2009 will be sent to your in box when you sign up here – I will be making very special offer that will help you get more done with less stress.
The Disruptive Cost Of Multi-Tasking
August 27, 2009
How often are you interrupted in a day? I am not referring to visitors dropping in to pay you unannounced visits, or the little ones wanting to play with you since you work from home. I am referring to the flood of emails, phone calls and text messages that bombard you throughout the day.
While increasing workload and tighter deadlines, you try to cramp all you need to do in the little time you have. Office workers and entrepreneurs alike start doing what mothers do so well – they multi-task.
Multitasking has become a workplace buzzword as blackberry and ipod push mainstream culture into a 24/7 stand by lifestyle. So much so that you begin to feel uncomfortable and out of touch if you are without your gadgets for a few hours.
Well, I have news for you. Your brain can only make one decision at a time. As you multi-task your brain is not handling all the tasks at once, it is switching back and forth between tasks. The constant effort means that doing even just two or three things at once puts far more demand on our brains compared with if we did them one after another.
This is what multi-tasking does to you:
Reduces your intelligence – A study carried out at the British Institute of Psychiatry found that excessive use of technology reduced workers' intelligence and that those distracted by incoming e-mail and phone calls saw a ten-point fall in their IQ, over twice the impact of smoking or marijuana use.
Pretty scary huh?
Wastes your time – Another study reports that the American worker wastes 2.1 hours per day due to multitasking. When distracted while performing a task, it takes time to get yourself into the context of the new task and complete the new task. And then it takes recovery time to get back on track with the original task.
Compromises productivity – multitasking makes us less effective, not more. Your digital assistants are tools don’t serve them. Do not allow them to break your focus. That task switch takes up a longer time. It is easier to keep going once the juice is flowing and you are going at full steam than to abruptly stop and do something unrelated and re orientate to finish up the original later. That may take 3 times as long to do the same amount of work because now you have to retrieve all your background information and bring it back to the consciousness of your mind.
Introduces health risks – When you go back and forth between browsing the Internet to talking on a cell phone, you are using different parts of your brain. The mental processes involved in switching tasks takes up time and effort. It tires you out easily.
You get overwhelmed, mental burnout, anxiety and this may to depression. You need more time to get the same amount of work done and that taxes your brain switching between tasks. The quality of the work suffers and you do not get the sense of achievement. You know you can do better work but multi-tasking has robbed you of performing at your best. Another form of work related stress.
Lowers the threshold of distractibility - The fast paced multi tasking culture is pushing you to be more easily distractible and less able to focus over sustained periods of time. Just how often you look at your blackberry? You are almost anticipating the next alert; your mind is not really concentrating on the task at hand. And you continue to program yourself to expect to be distracted.
What can we do about this?
Turn off your email alerts, tweet deck, blackberry, facebook chats, RSS feeds and maybe even your phone when you are doing creative work. Then check your in box and voice mails at schedule times. Try that for a couple of days and see if it allows you to be more efficient. Focus on the present; one task at a time. I can not emphasize this enough. Less is really more. Mono is really better than multi in this case.
Try this especially if you suffer attention deficits disorder.
Chunk your time – schedule what you need to do into chunks of time. Do all you related work in one sitting. Take short breaks in between that uses different parts of the brain. Better still get out of your chair and do some physical movements. Break the state and then proceed to the next task. This way, you make sure all you need to do will be attended to and you will get more done in shorter time with better results – gotta love that productivity.
Practice having quiet moments in your day, whether it is morning, lunch time or just before you retire to bed. Some quiet meditation and deep breathing will quiet your mind and help you regain focus and attention span and set you up for a more focus and successful day.
Additional resources available to help you reduce stress.
Email Stress
August 25, 2009
How do you deal with having the flood of emails in your inbox everyday? Not to mention the same mails that is also invading your blackberry?
Research tells us that the average office worker spends about 49 minutes every day managing their email whilst more senior staff can spend up to 4 hours a day processing their In Boxes. There is just so many emails coming in on a daily basis and employees and home entrepreneurs are plagued by "email stress".
First of all having an empty In Box may not be a sign of success. Until the day I leave this world, my In Box may still be unattended to. And that would be ok with me.
Having said that it is good to keep a clean In Box, it’s like keeping a clean desk. The un-cluttering clears the mind for more creative work. A clean email box reduces your work place stress.
To manage the volume of mails, consider using the following tips:
Communicate Expectation - There is usually not an urgent need to respond to emails immediately – a 48 hour turnaround time is quite acceptable. And if you are on the road or travelling, set up an auto responder that communicate that to your readers, they will understand if you are not able to respond within 48 hours.
Turn off e-mail alerts – check emails at regularly set times. Breaking your chain of thought every time an email comes in will disrupt your concentration and creativity. When you need to get some work done, turn off your emails. You can attend to the mails when you have completed your work. Multi-tasking kills productivity.
This way you are focus and not needing to tune in and out constantly, disrupting your thoughts and exhausting yourself in the process. This is the most inefficient use of your time and resources. How many times do you switch between what you are doing and check on emails? That much time and energy is wasted daily.
And if you are not comfortable with this rule then send out a broadcast and announce your new policy, that you will only check mails x times a day and thank your readers for their understanding and patience. This is not an excuse not to respond to mail but it helps to relief you of the need to drop everything you are working on just to respond immediately. This alone will increase your productivity and reduce your stress.
Get Organised – make use of filters and rules to help you keep your in box lean and clean.
Create rules and send spam straight to the trash without it even appearing in your inbox.
You can also create folders/labels and have mails automatically delivered into the respective folders so you can read or process these unimportant mails on the weekends. If you feel stress when you see many emails unattended to in your inbox, then clear out the clutter and create some space. Keep your in box nice and clean and empty your trash at the end of every day.
Processed emails once – as far as it is possible, process urgent emails when you read them and file others away to be followed up or delegated. Read and process or delete or file.
Unsubscribe from any list that you are no longer using. Or set up rules to send them to your folders for follow up. You can have “to check out” folders.
If you have too many email accounts – consolidate. Either forward all accounts to one main account or cancel off the extra accounts. All you need is one personal account and one business account. And you will want to keep these for separate mails.
For more practical stress-relief tips watch our National Day 24-hour sale on 31st Aug. Sign up to be notified.
Connect With Me
Favourite Links
-
eZine Article Author
