The two most common relate to seemingly never ending threads of emails and too many meetings.
For emails, they are a necessary part of work life but you have to be able to clear the clutter and know how to manage the important versus the nice to know.
A few simple tips include being able to reduce the noise!
- Try colour coding your superiors, when they speak, look and react. Treat the rest as noise unless you are working on a project that requires your colleagues to engage now to move forward.
- Use your junk email filter proactively, do a test and after two weeks if you still have newsletters and emails in your folder you feel don’t really enrich your professional existence, drag them to the junk folder. You well never see them again. If you feel you’ve missed. something, reverse the process from the folder. Try it, you will enjoy the liberation.
- Use email rules to auto file informational emails into your filing system.
- Once a week, either Monday morning or Friday afternoon, get deleting and be brutal!
- And finally, if you have an office culture where everyone has a view, and then there is a view on that, and you have to be involved due to said culture, be smarter, and only engage once. Usually the best way is at the end of the day, let those who want to involve themselves knock themselves out, and then just engage share one view. Notice that possibly your boss does this too? They usually do it in the evening.
- If you are easily overwhelmed by the size of your inbox, control it don’t let it control you!
Meetings are a little trickier as this can also be a cultural thing in the organisation. If some of them run too long or seem completely irrelevant to you, keep a detailed log of them over a period of about a month. Make notes about who was involved and what is was about and how long it took and the end result for you. Sometimes the easiest way is to populate the meeting (in outlook) and print it off, and get writing, all your data will then be there. Dump into word if you prefer to soft copy everything.
If you end up in a place where you have quite a bit of data (as this is), either wait until the next team meeting where you can attempt to manage an intervention on the team OR if more suitable, chat to your boss about it. Most managers will be comfortable discussing these kinds of issues if they believe workplace inefficiencies are an issue. They will get your point quickly.
There are a few tools I use with my clients to help them have a bit of a model around this. And I give attribution to my executive coach Taki Moore for helping me on this path.
See attached images below.
First, do a Drag Audit, list them and look at the impact on your and likely your colleagues and then come up with some strategies to try and control them or reduce them, better still remove them if possible. Ensure you have a measurable actions list. This data can then be used for sensible conversations with those around you to show the impact in black and white.
On the other side in this tool, focus on the positive, do a Lift Analysis……what are the things that lift you up and help you soar like an eagle at work? Complete the boxes in tool in the same way as the Drag Audit.
Finally you can transfer this data to a summary sheet and be disciplined, get this down to ONLY 3 focus areas for now. Which 3 are affecting you the most?
By taking this approach, this helps you to identify your productivity issues in the workplace. Chances are, there are others around you in the same situation.
Imagine the impact this simple tool could have on the workplace if you had the entire team that is in your surrounding world carry out the same audit? Once you all come together you may well be able to relieve some of the issues.
I recently ran this exercise is an office and the impact was instant.
By focusing in this way, it feels like you are taking control of your own situation, if you have the confidence to have this spread across the office, you are well on your way to leading some real change that I guarantee will benefit everyone at work.
This is just one of the things we put in place with my clients, we regularly check in and repeat the exercise. I know this isn’t complex stuff but we need to remind ourselves all the time, of the importance of getting our own self sorted first.
Having worked for large multinational companies in senior marketing roles for over 20 years, I’ve now fit my own mask and have turned my skills to helping NFP marketers……
- Focus
- Create more thinking time
- Cut through the clutter
- Automate and outsource and ultimately
- Get more bang for your buck!
This is for the organisation and for you, personally.
In my 6 week on line program, I help you discover and start to unpack, a simple 5 Step Plan that increases your professional worth to your boss, whilst freeing up time for you to plan and execute new ideas for your Not-For-Profit organisation and review your future career prospects. Learning new skills is part of that.
My aim is to help Not-For-Profit Marketers become a Million Dollar Marketer on a NFP budget!
After having helped many hundreds of Not-For-Profit marketers really excel at their work in recent years, this 5 Step plan helps alleviate some of the frustrations and concerns that can shackle us down and to rise above, to think and act like a million dollar commercial marketer.
You can learn too.
As a taste, this week, we are giving away a FREE copy of the “5 Step Plan: Become a Million Dollar Marketer, on a Not-For-Profit budget” Blueprint. In it, I break down the exact 5-steps to deploy in your NFP business. Click here to download your free copy www.milliondollarnfpmarketer.com
The attached worksheets (images x3) are typical of the style of hands on learning we engage in, in these on line workshops.
Fit your own mask first, and you will be able to help others!
If you want all the details of the 6 week program, get the details here https://milliondollarnfpmarketer.com/5-step-program
It’s just $447 for x6 one hour webinars. We hold the at lunchtime and early evenings, mid week. Next session intake is soon.
That’s the first step involved in becoming a Million Dollar Marketer on a Not-For-Profit budget.