Being Busy vs Getting S**T Done

A little background on myself. I am an executive assistant and a project manager for two different companies. My day is spent in several different inboxes, working on tasks for a multitude of projects and jumping in and out of client meetings where I take notes. I have been doing this work for a little over 2 years now and have spent over 10 years working in operations for a variety of companies. Based on all of this experience, I have generated a few pet peeves. There is one in particular, that bugs me the most. People Being Busy instead of Getting S**T Done. 

Most of the time I see people are "busy", they are just wasting time. And you might not believe me, but I have a few examples for you. 

- Having five 1-hour long meetings to discuss edits for a paper. Seen it. 

- Randomly talking with clients on the phone that have nothing to do with an active project. Seen it.

- Talking to a personal trainer about how to work out, but not actually doing anything. Seen it.

The point I am trying to get at it, is this bothers me...a lot. I instead expect to see people Getting S**T Done.

You might ask, "Well, Michael, what would Getting S**T Done look like?"

That's a great question!

First, when you start your week, you look at your active projects and determine which projects you are going to work on each day of the week. If the goal for Monday is to build a website for client A. Then your focus, for a majority of the day, is to be build the website. Do not allow clients or anyone else for that matter, to pull you away from that task. On Tuesday, if the focus is writing articles for a client. Start the day, with writing those articles. I don't mean, to only work on those things. But do them first. Get S**T Done. 

You might think that I am unrealistic, but I'm not. I work for TWO companies. Every morning, I decide what client projects that I am going to focus on for each hour of the day. And except for the times that a priority arises or I have a meeting, I do those tasks. 

Secondly, it's all about time management. I am not here to preach any sort of time management philosophy. Instead, I will tell you to try different ones until one works great for you. It took me many years to find a system that works and I'm still changing it often. The key is not to have to remember the work that needs to be done. It is to use a system to record the projects, clients and tasks as you go. 

Lastly, but not least, to Get S**T Done, you must put a time limit on yourself. This might sound silly, but if you know that you can just keep on working, you won't push yourself to finish. A little secret, I am an hourly employee....shhh don't tell anyone. To this day, every time the discussion comes up if I want to become salary, the answer is no. I have a few reasons, that I shall keep to myself, but the one i will share, is that I thrive under a time crunch. If I know that I have only have 3 hours left in my day to get my tasks done. Then I push myself to get them done. If I didn't have that deadline, I would just keep working, but much slower. 

I hope you have learned a little bit amount myself. My biggest pet peeve is when I see being being "Busy" instead of Getting S**T Done.