How productive you are each day all depends on how well you organise your time – preferably into manageable segments.
It is important to organise each new day by locating a specific space for the largest projects, and thereafter this should be followed by several medium segments where you group certain activities together.
Small segments should then fill up the gaps between the large and medium segments. If you do the opposite and fill the day with the small segments instead before you even have time for the most pressing issues, chances are that you will find that at the end of the day you have not even touched on important priorities.
How you manage your time and how your work flows will have an impact on your bottom line – start your day with the biggest chunk of work and you will soon find that you will use your time more sensibly, and thus will achieve a lot more.
The big stuff:
A good point of entry is to build your day’s foundation on an uninterrupted segment of time where you can stay focused on problematic, complicated projects.
The perfect length for these tasks should be and hour and a half – or 20% of an eight-hour work day.
If you simply cannot find that amount of time to dedicate to a specific task – switch off your phone, don’t look at any emails and just stay completely focused.
If you are able to block off everything else during this 20% portion, remember that you will be able to accomplish about 80% of your work for the day.
Multi-tasking and the not such big stuff:
Grouping as many similar activities together during the day – these include attending to phone messages and phone calls, processing emails, filing or reading etc. will prove to be effective.
By staying focused instead of multi-tasking will enable you to complete projects but if you are multi-tasking and doing more than one thing at any one time, this could probably slow you down quite substantially.
Medium-sized tasks can easily be tackled sporadically throughout the day – by spreading these out, you will be able to spend short spurts of quality time tackling a myriad tasks.
Now for the small stuff:
This is where the low priority tasks and new items are worked in-between all the other more important, pressing tasks during the day.
These could be anything from quick questions being answered, assisting with various tasks that need to be tackled, and of course, that much needed cup of coffee or cigarette.
If you start each new day in a structured fashion by allocating the important and pressing tasks to the first 20% of an eight-hour day, and working the lesser tasks around these, you will be pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to time manage your day more effectively.
