How to Find Your Flow While Working Through the Holidays

How to Find Your Flow While Working Through the Holidays

Some of us are working through this holiday season – maybe not our regular 9-5pm, but perhaps from home a couple hours each day or a couple of days this week to keep abreast of what’s going on or what to expect when everyone is back in action come January 4.

There’s no better week than now to start to think of your calendar and your time as your investment statement.

Think about it - time is our greatest opportunity AND our greatest liability.

How can we capitalize on this opportunity and minimize the liability?

Take control and choose to look at time, not as something to be “managed”, but as a framework that helps us to find our business rhythm or flow.

Use FLOW is a guide or structure for your business day.

F: Financials and Focus

Ask yourself: Where is my revenue line? Where do I add value to the company? How close to the revenue line is my daily work?

Ask yourself: What is my focus for today, this week, this month, this year?

• The answers to these two questions become the guidelines for building your schedule.
• When you look at your calendar or schedule, enter the activities, projects and tasks FIRSTthat are closest to the revenue line and your focus.

Now you have ensured that you have time to work on the items that are closest to the revenue line and are the highest priority items. Fill in the other activities around these items.

L: Location

Ask yourself: Do all of my activities/tasks have a place in my calendar?

• As the pace of work continues to speed up, unless projects, meetings and activities, both personal and professional, have a place in your calendar then how can you realistically know how much time you can allot for a task? How can you know that you even have the time to do a task?
• Have you ever packed for a trip and kept adding more and more things to your suitcase? Then your suitcase is so full, you have to sit on it to get it closed. Time is the suitcase. We can only put so many things on our calendar and then we just run out of room. So, does everything have a place in your calendar?

O: Organize

• Ask yourself:If your priority is to increase revenue, then how must you organize your days to support your goal?
• Ask yourself: How must you organize your physical office space to support your goals?

Organize your days around your priorities. Then, structure your environment to support them.

W: Work

Design a system that allows you to flow through your days.

Ask yourself:

• When is your energy high?
• When is your energy low?
• How can you structure your schedule around your energy levels?
• Do you want to do all of your intense, focused work in the morning and respond to customers in the afternoon?
• What type of work can you do when your energy is notat its peak?
• What calendar tool works best for you – paper or electronic?
• How do you process information?
• Do you like to receive information electronically, verbally, or printed?
• Is there a planner, app or computer application that can help you increase your efficiency?
• Can you download contact management software?
• Can you have your assistant enter all of your appointments?
• Have you allowed enough time for you to respond to an urgent deadline, a personal emergency, or for fun?

 Now, make it work for you this week; and then use your key learnings or observations to hit the ground running in ’16.

Happy New Year!

 Carson Tate is the founder and principal of Working Simply, a management consultancy. Our mission is to bring productivity with passion back to the workplace. We do this by providing tailored solutions that help people to work smarter, not harder.  Her new book, Work Simply, was published via Penguin Portfolio earlier this year.