1. Don’t start your day with email. Jumping into email first thing in the morning is a sure way to let other people’s agendas trump your own work objectives. It’s easy to spend a whole day responding to non-urgent requests and emptying your inbox, while never getting to any of your key deliverables.
- Do this instead: Take three minutes each evening before you leave the office to write down your thoughts on the most important tasks for the next day.
- Prioritize your to-do list from the previous evening and see what needs your attention.
2. Master the details. Research has shown that having goals that are too broad at the beginning of your career can cause you to lose effectiveness. While you may be eager to step into a bigger game, honing in on more detailed work and mastering a narrow area first can be a smarter strategy to make the most effective use of your time at work.
3. Harness group brainpower. Putting heads together helps increase your effectiveness at creativity and idea generation. Brainstorming sessions are an amazing way to collect a wide range of options in a short period.
- Save meeting time by using a whiteboard in a public area, like a conference room
4. Take a 15-minute breather. The last thing anyone feels like doing when they’re on a roll with an important project is to rest and regroup. But research shows that taking short breaks throughout the day can keep you from losing steam and burning out on a task. A brief break of 15 minutes or so every few hours can keep you mentally fresher, which in turn fuels productivity, improves decision-making and reactivates your interest in the project’s goals.
5. Expect interruptions. A major problem with effective planning is that people overschedule and overcommit, thinking they’ll be able to accomplish much more than anyone reasonably could do in one day. Part of the issue is that every workday has interruptions, and those aren’t built into your time table.
Source: Robin Madell, author of “Surviving Your Thirties: Americans Talk About Life After 30” and co-author of “The Strong Principles: Career Success.”
