Dealing with Time Inhibitors
In my last article, I started to dig into time awareness, specifically focusing on personal “fast times” and “slow times.” Today I want to address another aspect of time awareness: time inhibitors caused by external factors. Before I get into my strategies for dealing with outside distractors, take a moment to think about how you handle distractions when they come up. What’s your initial reaction to receiving an email? Do you drop everything and respond right away? What about when you get notifications on social media? How about that random office ‘drop-in’ or cell phone call to ‘catch-up?’
External time inhibitors are inevitable in every work place but a key difference between productive and unproductive people/sales professionals is how they deal with things that pop up unexpectedly. External time wasters often come in the form of an email. Workers today spend upwards of 40% of their time dealing with emails, and the yearly cost of time spent on e-mails alone can exceed $20,000 dollars, depending on salary scale. Emails can distract you from more important and on-going tasks at hand. The not-so-funny thing is that 30% of these emails are neither urgent nor important.
Here’s how to make sure you don’t end up wasting away your day sending emails:
1. Hold off dealing with e-mails until a dead period for you. This keeps you from becoming slowed in your progress toward your goals.
2. Keep messages brief and concise.
3. Don’t live on your e-mail.
4. Learn to use your e-mail system. Categorize your e-mails, and divide between work and home e-mail accounts.
5. Know why you’re sending every e-mail. E-mail is supposed to be a tool to help you do your job.
6. Be prudent. Don’t overuse e-mail lists or send unnecessary attachments, be conscientious in subscribing to e-mail groups and unsubscribe to any that don’t provide meaningful information.
7. Group similar activities together. Practice doing similar activities (emails, calls, etc.) in the same time chunks in order to gain some efficiencies.
It’s likely that emails aren’t your only time wasters, it’s important to evaluate what activities move you towards your goals and which inhibit that movement. Maybe it’s sales reports that slow you down, maybe it’s meetings where you neither contribute nor learn. While some of these are necessary, others are not and you have the responsibility to speak up if your time is being wasted or if it could be used more efficiently. If you need, have a conversation with your boss about how sales reports impede your progress, come forward with a solution that will help you to get more done. These will definitely be difficult conversations, but if you come to the table with solutions that could lead to better productivity, hopefully they won’t fall on deaf ears. Good luck!