Help, I don't have time...

Over the years, I have all too often heard:

• “I’m tired!”
• “I’m doing work which others should be doing!”
• “I can’t get on with other important stuff as I am involved in x or y all day!”
• “I don’t have the time to do what I should be doing!” 
• “I’m adding no value to the company”

Let's look a little deeper into the areas which consume time and what might be done to help.

Scheduled Meetings

Stop for 1 minute (go on, it's only 60 seconds!) and have a look at your calendar for last week and the upcoming week before considering the below points:

• How much of your time is committed to before the day or week even begins?
• Are you a “spectator” at the meetings or are you contributing?
• Were you really “in" the meeting?
• Did you miss any of the meetings and did it make any difference at all? 
• Are your peers or team members at the same meetings (other than team meetings of course!) as you?
• How much is that meeting costing the organisation? Consider the hourly rate of the attendees (this is always fun to do!), multiply it by the length of the meeting in hours and then gasp! How much are those weekly meetings with 50 attendees costing your organisation? 

By considering these points, you may start feeling a little uneasy or even frustrated that so much of our time is spent in meetings especially ones which you contribute little to (take this in the nicest way of course!)…

In short, big savings are to be had in this space! Some of the meetings in your diary are no doubt important, and whilst I am not advocating declining all meetings (wouldn’t that be nice though?) thinking through these points makes us consider where we spend our time.

Some common approaches which may help:

• Ask for a meeting agenda if there isn’t one 
• Ask the person scheduling the meeting how you can add value, what do they need from you?
• If you don’t need to be there but still have an interest, ask for minutes or a recording of the meeting to be shared
• Ask someone to share their notes from the meeting – this may even encourage them to be “in” the meeting too!
• Review recurring meetings – are they still delivering what they were planned to?
• Review the meetings you have scheduled to ensure that you are requesting the time of the correct people for the agenda of the meeting – no, none of us are perfect! 

“Unplanned” work

Every time a message arrives, the phone rings, an email arrives, etc your “flow” is disrupted - you will need time to get back into whatever it was you were doing. Don't kick yourself on this point, you are human!

Some approaches that may help in this area are below - I know you will look at some and think “WHAT?”! Change is tough (and we don’t like it very much), but why not give them a go if it is possible to do so in your organisation and role:

• Read email 3 times a day – we get too much email and we spend too much time reading email. How about reading email at the beginning, middle and end of your day, where the nature of your work allows. Most people will say “impossible” and feel uneasy on this one – be honest with yourself, what would the delay reading/responding to an email trail really mean? “Don’t rely on email for urgent issues, call!” is a sensible approach in my view.  

Understand

Make sure you understand the ask, the urgency and who's accountable for the ask.

• Understand the ask - Ensure that you understand what is being asked for. How often have you been asked for x and delivered y because you didn’t spend the time, for whatever reason, to fully understand the ask? None of us are perfect! 
• Confirm the urgency - Don’t assume that every ask needs to be carried out immediately – I know the feeling when your manager asks you “can you do x?”. I know people want to please and we often think that what is being asked for is a high urgency and priority of the person asking for it. I have found however that by asking “what’s the priority on this?” or “when do you need this by?” often produces an answer other than “right now!”. Once again, if immediate asks come in, your flow on other asks will be disrupted and it will take your brain time to get back into the activity you stopped to handle the new ask.
• Accountable – are you accountable for the ask or is someone else? We all want to be good and super helpful people but ultimately the ask may be better handled or essential to be handled by someone else…

Escalations

Escalations can and do come from all angles and are often born from employee unhappiness with how “something” is being handled. Some organisations have well defined, documented and shared escalation processes and some do not.

Building an escalation process and communicating this may help. These do not need to be complicated - they simply need to provide details of who to contact and when. An example:

• First Escalation – <contact details> and when to contact 
• Second Escalation – <contact details> and when to trigger this escalation
• Third Escalation – <contact details> and when to trigger this escalation
• Service Management - <contact details> and when to trigger this escalation

Organisations may choose to handle escalations as part of a separate group or within the support organisation whether it be internally or externally provided. The important thing is that it has to work! Once this is in place, the process should be championed and used. In my experience, ensuring that those accountable for fixing the issue or fulfilling the request do so is a good strategy. Why not try the following if an escalation is made to you:

• Acknowledge the escalation
• Make the person escalating aware of the escalation process and the benefits of using it
• Initiate the process on their behalf on this occasion
• Check in later with the person who escalated (the same day wherever possible) to confirm their escalation has been handled and become more involved if it hasn’t

Reporting

I have written an article on reporting review and simplification so won’t add more at this point other than, this can be a big time saver if you get it correct.  

Stop, start and continue

Are the activities you are carrying out adding real value to the organisation? One very simple and effective approach to help answer this question and remove/reduce low value add activities may be:

• Brainstorm with your stakeholders what they want/need from you and get their view on priority – this is an interesting exercise that can help with the next steps
• Bring you team together to brainstorm and list all activities
• Make a decision what needs to continue 
• Make a decision on what needs to start (isn't being done at the moment) 
• Prioritise the list 
• Make a decision on what can be safely stopped – the low/no value stuff towards the bottom of the prioritised list may be a great place to start 
• Repeat! 

Share the information with your stakeholders and get their buy in! 

Final thought – we are all busy, we all want to be helpful and it's important to find time to fulfil the responsibilities of your role and add value to the organisation. By challenging what you currently do, how you do it and by ensuring others are fulfilling their responsibilities, so much more may be achieved. Have fun finding time and I hope you enjoyed this article.