Stop Overscheduling your Day with these Tips

Does this sound like you?

The end of the day has come and instead of feeling a sigh of relief and excitement that your day is over and you can finally relax, you feel completely anxious. You’ve been working steadily all day but looking back at your tasks you don’t seem to have accomplished much, and to make maters worse, you have more things left on your to do list than you were actually able to check off. You aren’t just worried because you have a lot of work left to do, but you know that tomorrow when you start all over again you are going make another list of even more tasks to get done and you know that you are going to fall further and further behind as new tasks pop up faster than you can finish your existing ones. If you can relate to this feeling of constantly over scheduling your day, the amount of work, events and tasks that you can reasonably manage, you are not alone. Time management is tough and as a skill, it requires time, focus and the ability to self analyze to master it. To get you started, I have a few tips that I’d like to share to help get you on the path to time management recovery, and hopefully help you start getting out ahead of your tasks, instead of constantly falling behind.

Tip #1

Log your work day to account for all the tasks and actions you take and the amount of time spent on each. Like I said, excelling at time management is no easy feat. You need to have a complete accounting of your time first and foremost to get visibility to the blindspots and pitfalls that are sabotaging your productivity. It’s not enough to sit down and recall the events of the day after its all over, you really need to actively write down your tasks and the time it took you to accomplish them as you are working. Since this could be hard to do, I suggest setting a timer to go off once an hour, and when it does you write down all the things you did during that time, even if you didn’t finish them yet. Try to make sure you keep all the activities in order so you can see if you were jumping between different types of tasks and make note of interruptions to your workflow and the reasons for them. This data is going to be very important!

Tip #2

Once your workday is complete, review your data. I want you to look and see how productive your day really was. Perhaps you did get a lot of work done, it just wasn’t work that came from your to-do list. Maybe reviewing this information you will see that you lost significant periods of time to interruptions that were unnecessary, like calls from friends or chats with coworkers. You need to use your best judgement to understand what issues were standing in the way of you working on your to do list. Did you have to attend unnecessary meetings? Or perhaps the meetings were productive but just a little too long, or you didn’t need to be there for the whole thing. Once you know where the problems are, you can start addressing those with superiors or coworkers and putting new systems and habits into place to ensure your productivity is protected from outside influence.

Tip #3

Now you need to take a look at the tasks you completed and those that were left open on your list. Did you work on things during the day that you weren’t actually responsible for? Perhaps a coworker delegated a project to you and you accepted it because you didn’t want to seem rude or you wanted to take on the project because it was important, even though it was just one more thing you didn’t have time for. Remember, your to do list is sacred space. You shouldn’t put items on your list that don’t fall into your realm of responsibility or you don’t actually have the time to get done. We all leave items on our to do lists that we look at and know we won’t work on, but we feel guilty that we haven’t done so and we think, perhaps today will be the day I do this! No. You don’t have time for these sorts of games and you need to treat your to do list with a sense of respect because its the outline for your plans for the day and the way you will spend your precious time. Don’t let things fall onto that list that don’t deserve your attention and don’t accept new tasks that you don’t have the time to devote your attention to fully!

Tip #4

Start assigning yourself less to do and find a way to batch and delegate essential tasks that someone else can do for you. I like to use the top 3 list in order to achieve this. Focus on three essential activities or events you need to accomplish for your day to be productive and take care of those as your priorities. Try to focus on the activities that will be the most important and impactful use of your time and get those out of the way as soon as possible. You will also want to batch similar tasks together and delegate whatever other tasks are in your way that someone else can handle. Do you have a team admin that can run some reports for you or schedule some of your meetings so you don’t have to? Is there an intern that you can borrow who can print and assemble a presentation you are working on? Can your office secretary that sits right next to the fax machine send those faxes you have piled up on your desk while she’s taking calls? Obviously you want to use whatever tools are at your disposal, and of course you want to make sure you are being courteous with other peoples time as well, so make sure you give clear, concise directions and make the tasks you delegate simple so you aren’t creating more work for another person as well.

Tip #5

Start pushing back on new tasks, events and projects that are unnecessary. We all get asked to do lots of things throughout our day that aren’t necessary to our job function. Perhaps you have been invited to sit in on a leadership meeting or to volunteer as part of an organization with your work. Even offers for long lunches out with coworkers can be tempting yet unnecessary interruptions to our days. Now, I am not saying that you should never volunteer for special projects at work or avoid a great networking opportunity to advance your career, however, if you are constantly behind on your work, you are in a situation that poses a real risk to your current job. I’ve worked with people in the past who were completely overwhelmed with their job, the only real work they were able to achieve from day to day was to put out fires from overdue products and tasks that should have been handled weeks or months prior, and still whenever a “good opportunity” came to them to be part of a leadership team that involved extra weekly meetings or to volunteer their time creating goody bags for an extracurricular networking event, they never said no. I think part of this is the nature of individuals to want to please others, so many people find it hard to say no, especially when it seems like these extra tasks will further their career. The truth is, however, this mentally eventually leads to ruin! So, push back on whatever new tasks and projects land on your lap, and cut out the fat of extra work you are volunteering for until you get yourself to a place where you are out ahead of your work. It’s not like you have to say no to every offer forever, you just need to say no long enough to get your priorities and your schedule in order!

Like I said, time management is not easy but I hope these five tips make it a little easier for you to get started reorganizing your task list and making the key habit changes that will help you to stop over scheduling your time. If this topic of productivity and structuring your time to be more efficient and more in control of your work day is interesting to you, I have a very exciting announcement! On Monday I will be RELAUNCHING my Productivity & Planning Webinar, so if you missed the webinar the first time around and want to catch the replay, sign up for my wait list and be the first to know when the webinar has gone live in the shop!

xoxo,