Your Personal Assistant.

When I was growing up, my grandfather ran a successful haulage business. I remember, outside his office, there was a secretary who did his typing and managed his diary. Her job (and it invariably was a female) was arranging meetings for him and responding to letters that needed responses.

In those days, secretaries were powerful. They controlled who had access to their boss and saw it as their job to protect their boss’s time so they could work on the higher-level objectives of the organisation without being distracted by trivialities. It didn’t matter whether you were the finance director or the sales manager; if the boss’s secretary said no, you cannot see my boss, that was it—no arguing.

Today, traditional secretaries have all but disappeared, and we’ve lost that filter—nobody is there filtering out the trivial, so we can get on and deal with the important. Technology has tried to help, but it is imperfect. While you probably don’t get as much spam in your mail as you used to, you still get it.

We now have to deal with all meeting requests, and because we would rather not disappoint people, we accept meetings we likely should not be attending. Being told, “My boss is busy today and cannot meet with you”, is somehow acceptable, whereas saying, “I’m sorry, I’m busy and cannot attend your meeting”, is not.

If you want the time to work on the important things, consider creating a virtual secretary. Using services such as Calendly puts you in control of when you are available for meetings. It takes away the awkwardness of saying “no” and helps the other person by giving them a list of the times you are available.

Blocking time out on your calendar (in effect, making appointments with yourself) prevents other people in your organisation from arranging meetings with you. Setting up filters in your email to filter out newsletters and emails from people you do not need to hear from also helps to reduce interruptions and distractions.

It takes courage to be less available; there’s the fear of missing out (FOMO) conundrum, but it’s worth it because of the time you get back and the respect you get from others for being serious about protecting your time. Few people do that today, and it’s refreshing to come across someone serious about their time.

When you do your weekly planning, ask yourself: How can I be less available? You don’t need to cut yourself off completely, but reducing your available time will do amazing things for your productivity.

If you'd like to learn more about how I can help you, visit my website www.carlpullein.com