6 Essentials to Make Your Workday Easier, More Efficient and Less Stressful

Working with stress and frustration means you’re not doing your BEST work. Use these steps to be more efficient and effective—plus make your workday easier.

Troubled by having too little time?

Mourning a few missed opportunities?

Stuck behind bars in email jail?

The challenges of trying to keep up can get you down.

You’re bombarded by rounds of incoming information, communication, and tasks with no system in sight to save you.

You lose a bit of your motivation because you’re constantly feeling behind.

And the process of “trial and error” to find a solution doesn’t solve the problem.

When you’re frustrated—or downright overwhelmed—it’s easy to get side-tracked, distracted, fed up, and stressed out.

And when you’re feeling that way, you’re not doing your best work. Plus, it not good for you, your work, your results, or your job or your business.

To help you stay focused on what really matters, here are 6 essential strategies you can use to manage your work more efficiently and make your workday a lot easier.

As a result, you can increase your levels of effectiveness, productivity and progress with a lot less stress.

1.?MANAGE TASKS BY PRIORITY, NOT PROXIMITY

When you try to manage tasks, requests, and emails as they SHOW up you’ll never be able to KEEP up.

It’s like hitting baseballs from the machine in a batting cage and treating everything exactly the same with no sense of priority. Things are showing up, and you’re swinging at them, one after the other.

With that approach, you’ll never make the progress I know you’re trying to make on your most important tasks.

You won’t be very proactive about your priorities or have a high sense of urgency for getting them done, simply because they’re not in your line of sight.

In addition, a reactive approach creates a high probability that something important will be missed, lost or forgotten.

To work more proactively and with more control, document every task, reminder and follow-up you’re responsible for in a digital task list—ONE place. And not just WHAT you need to do, but also WHEN.

When you get your tasks together into a single, central, digital inventory, you’ll see how easy it is to compare, prioritize, and create a plan of action that is accurate and completely up to date.

With a list like this, you’ll gain incredible CLARITY, awareness, and great relief from the constant worry that you may have missed something.

You can happily clear your mind and focus on DOING important tasks instead of trying to remember them.

?

2.?BE INACCESSIBLE FOR PERIODS OF TIME

The all-day, open-door policy will destroy your focus, concentration and progress.

I answered a question once from an audience member who felt guilty about shutting his door. He wanted to stay accessible to his people ALL the time.

But you MUST shut your door for short periods of time—or find another way to disappear at points throughout your day—so you can get quiet time, stay focused, and get something done… from start to finish, no matter how big or small.

Protect at least an hour (if not TWO!) each day to get important tasks accomplished. And not just for SOME days of the week. EVERY day. EVERY week. Then outside of the time you protect for yourself and your priorities, you can be available to others who need access to you.

You can’t be reachable all of the time by everyone and expect to get ANYTHING of importance accomplished.

YOUR progress is important too.

3. ASK OFTEN, "IS THIS THE BEST USE OF MY TIME?"

At the start of our work together, a client once told me she realized she’d been operating “in a fog” from day to day without a clear plan of action.

Her to-dos were everywhere—on paper, in email, on to-do lists, and elsewhere—and this gave her NO clarity of task volume or top priorities.

When you lack this kind of clarity, it will cause a lack of certainty and control, especially when you’re under pressure to make progress.

Your days are already hectic, are they not?

But lacking clarity, now you’re frantic on top of it.

Without a solid plan, you end up spinning your wheels, wasting time guessing what to work on next, and getting caught up in the distractions sitting on your desk.?

Further, your focus and your defenses are weakened when interruptions come along. Or you try to multi-task in a desperate attempt to get something done.

All of these are costing you. And they’re costing your business or the company you work for.

If you often wonder if what you’re doing is THE most important thing you should be working on, it’s because right now you don’t have a sure-fire way to know.

And that's why you need one. The only way to truly know is to create a plan that includes EVERYTHING, which will give you the power to make better decisions more often about important tasks and top priorities.

Then you’ll be in a much stronger position to protect the time you need, use it with clarity of purpose, and KNOW that what you’re working on at ANY moment is the BEST use of your time.

4.?DON'T OVER-COMMIT OR YOU'LL OVERDO IT

Clients I’ve worked with often experienced a CONSTANT shortage of time before we started working together. And it wasn’t because others were stealing it. It was because my clients were giving it all away.

This puts them—and you, if you’re doing this, too—in a position of ALWAYS feeling behind, which is stressful and exhausting.

Over-commitment can be caused when you say “yes” far more often than saying “no.” You could agree to take on too many new tasks or projects when you’re already struggling to meet the deadlines of EXISTING projects. Or worse, existing projects get BUMPED for the new ones.

New business is great, but it’s terrible for existing clients and co-workers who are waiting for the completion of work you’ve already agreed to do. And when your time and your work are not managed well, it doesn’t reflect well on you, whether you hold a job or own a business.

Over-commitment can also be caused by not having enough people to delegate to, not properly estimating how long it takes to do a task or project, not planning or protecting the time you need far enough in advance, spending too much time micromanaging others, and more.

Please… don’t over-extend yourself. Take care of planning, prioritizing and accomplishing what you’ve promised already, and when you take on more, make sure you plan it out far enough that you don’t break existing promises or make those—who have already been waiting—wait even longer.

5.?MAKE YOUR TASK LIST #1

Email is like quicksand.

You can get caught in it pretty fast and not be able to escape, and before you know it, you’ve lost precious time you could have spent on your top priority for the day.

It’s not that email is NOT important. It is. But you have to weigh what’s sitting in your email Inbox with what’s ALREADY on your task list and THEN make an informed decision.

Processing NEW emails you received overnight is fine first thing in the morning before moving to your first priority of the day, but getting stuck in email for hours and hours is NOT fine.

Most of my clients realize something as we work together and that is how much POWER they allowed email to have over their day. They call it “living from the Inbox,” where they make decisions about what to do next in their day by what appears next in their email Inbox.

To avoid this trap, make it a point to go to your task list first (a single, central, digital task list accessible on your computer) to SEE what you said you wanted to do today. Have the list for TODAY in your mind before getting stuck in the email Inbox.

Spend time on your most important task FIRST in the day and then go back to email. Toggle back and forth throughout the day, making sure you keeping your eye on the NEXT most important task to tackle.

?

6. SAVE TIME BY FINDING THINGS FAST

Plenty of research tells us how costly it is to be disorganized. A old 2010 Brother International survey revealed the high cost of looking for things in computers and offices, which totaled more than $177 billion dollars annually—back then. ?I can only imagine what that would be today.

But the losses weren’t identified only in dollars. The survey revealed other sad findings as well…

• 87% of office workers reported that when their workspace is disorganized they feel they are less productive
• 80% agree that someone who is disorganized “hurts the productivity of the whole office.”
• About 37% of office workers have gone into a work meeting feeling unprepared.

?So, how about you?

?Are you feeling organized or disorganized these days?

And how much time are you losing every day when you have to stop what you’re doing to look for something and you DON’T find it within 15 seconds?

Do you want to continue losing that time?

Time is our most valuable, NON-renewable resource. Once it’s gone, you can never get it back.

It’s time to RESTORE ORDER if you are feeling “out of order.”

Establish systems for easy storage and retrieval of reference and use a single, central, digital task list on your computer for active tasks.

You will save a LOT of time in the future that you can use more efficiently and effectively to complete tasks and make a LOT more progress.

===========

When you spend too much time on trial and error with tips and tactics from over here and an app or a hack from over there, you won’t gain the benefits of a TOTAL system, approach, or method that handles workload management.

Usually, the short-cuts and apps you find handle only ONE part of your day: just tasks, just time, just email, or just something else.

When a system, approach or method is all inclusive, everything you learn will complement everything else. It will GO together and WORK together to give you a seamless way to manage your work AND your workday.

Invest time in learning a system that allows you to do your BEST work. It will offer you huge benefits in added time, better focus, and increased productivity. You’ll be MUCH more efficient and effective, and you can make MASSIVE progress.

Not only this, but your workday will be much easier and less stressful, and you’ll save a lot of time from looking for tips and solutions to try out in your “trial and error” process.

To learn more about what's possible for your workday efficiency and productivity so you can have MORE time, LESS stress and an EASIER, more productive workday, visit https://productiveday.com or email Leslie directly at [email protected].