The Productivity Pro® Blog by Laura Stack - Time Management, Getting Things Done, How to Be More Productive

How much time is wasted at work in your experience?  I just read a recent article at SmartCompany which talked about a recent study by Ernst & Young.  The study indicates that 18% of time at work could be considered unproductive.  That it a lot of time that could be spent creating value! Some of the items  the 2500 respondents referred to as time wasters are:

• Internal administration, red tape and meetings
• Waiting for IT systems
• Jobs needing to be redone

Some time wasters are beyond an employee’s control, but some of that wasted time could potentially be used in other ways.  Would love to hear how you handle seemingly unavoidable time wasters in your day.

It’s frustrating to want to print from a website when the formatting doesn’t work. It’s inefficient to try to copy and paste into another document to print. I found a useful little tool on the web that makes it easy to print from websites, so I wanted to share it with all of you! Check out PrintFriendly when you need to print from a website. It allows you to see a preview of how your printed page would look, and also allows you to print as a PDF. Just enter in the url you want to print from:

Click “Print Preview” to see what your page will look like, then select Print or PDF and you’re all set!

Increases efficiency, saves ink, and saves time. Very handy!

“My to-do list is so long that it doesn’t have an end; it has an event horizon.” — Craig Bruce, Canadian Software Engineer.

“According to USA Today, an astonishing 95 percent of companies don’t share their strategies with employees.” — Joel Garfinkle, American inspirational speaker.

Efficient time management requires the establishment of a dependable routine. The modern office worker can tap a variety of tools when constructing such a productivity framework, with the simple to-do list arguably the most important tool in the chest. But this begs a question: What rules do you apply to determine what goes onto your daily to-do list in the first place? In other words, how do you decide what you should be working on each day?

This question goes to the very heart of personal productivity. So let’s look at a few factors that can help you determine what to focus your attention on, so you don’t waste time and endanger your career with missteps.

Your Job Requirements
Start by asking yourself, “Why am I here?” What, precisely, did the company hire you to do? Acquire a thorough familiarity with all the requirements of your job—not just the ones published in the job description, but the informal ones as well. The latter do exist in most jobs, and it may take you a while to discover them all. If your job has published performance objectives, learn them by heart—and don’t assume they’ll remain static from year to year or even month to month. They may well evolve as time passes. If you stick to the same set-in-concrete routine, you may end up damaging your workplace productivity.

If you aren’t entirely sure about everything the job requires of you, don’t hesitate to ask your superiors. Try to ask probing questions, to get beyond the “official” requirements and into the nitty-gritty details that HR may not have informed you about when you interviewed for the position.

Another good source of guidance will come during your annual performance reviews, when your boss rates how well you do your job. As necessary, ask him or her to provide pointers to help you refine your personal productivity. Take notes, and make a sincere effort to implement what you’ve learned.

Know Your Company Strategy
Do you have a clear idea of your company’s grand strategy? Studies show that very few rank-and-file workers do; and this is one situation where what you don’t know can definitely hurt you. If your company’s mission is largely a mystery to you, then I suggest you make a deliberate effort to learn it. At the very least, study annual reports and presentations to shareholders and investors. For a more personal touch, make an appointment with your department head, and ask them to make a presentation on the subject to your team.

Once you understand the general corporate strategy, tighten the focus to your department and team in order to clarify the more immediate aspects of the company’s goals. You may discover your boss has specific policies he or she focuses on, while other teams handle different aspects of the overall strategy. In any case, start incorporating what you’ve found into your daily schedule wherever possible.

The Master List
Most of your daily to-do list will consist of tasks funneled to you on a regular basis during meetings, emails, phone calls, and direct verbal communications with your superiors. These are the urgent tasks you need to tend to ASAP to keep your productivity at work moving along smoothly. But while they may rank as important in the short term, you can’t allow them to overwhelm the long-term projects and issues that, while not especially urgent, you must accomplish in order to achieve true workplace success.

This is where the concept of the master to-do list comes in. Think of it as a “brain dump” file containing all the things you want to do eventually, but that you need not take care of right away. Many of the strategic goals of your company, department, and team will end up here, along with “someday” ideas like revamping old workflow systems and inventing new ones, or your intention to learn a new programming language. Your master list keeps your daily list from overflowing into uselessness, and it may consist of dozens or hundreds of entries as a result. Whenever something important comes in that lacks urgency or has no set deadline, add it to the master list.

A master list should be a living, evolving document that guides your long-term workflow; you can’t let it turn into a dead-file for forgotten tasks. To keep it at the top of your mind, review it at least weekly. You can use the Category feature in Outlook or your email program to group like items or projects. Leave time in your schedule for strategic, long-term projects. For example, you might schedule one timeslot a day for working on a project requiring thinking or concentration, or you might find spaces for three a week. Whatever works for you is fine, as long as you keep your master list firmly in mind. When the block of time arrives, turn everything off and resist the urge to check email or open a browser.

The Bottom Line
The average daily to-do list contains a mix of items with different priorities, originating from a variety of sources. By necessity, it will be weighted toward urgent but relatively unimportant items, with a leavening of non-urgent but essential tasks—i.e., the things that count most in the long run. An effective to-do list takes both into account, folds in crisis situations as they occur, and deletes the trivial.

Make absolutely sure that the crises and daily minutiae don’t overwhelm the long-term tasks. Purely reactive busyness will get you nowhere if it’s not underlain and supported by the solid bedrock of job requirements, strategic goals, process maintenance, and other important but non-urgent items. Handling all these proactively, in combination with daily routine, results in honest-to-goodness personal productivity.

Laura Stack, The Productivity Pro(R) shares time management skills: tips on getting to those unpleasant tasks we’ve put off. (C) 2011 Laura Stack, All Rights Reserved http://www.TheProductivityPro.com

“I don’t check my e-mail, it checks me to see if I’m still there.” — Ian Pattison, poll respondent, Canada

“I never switch it off, and I also have a self-imposed policy of responding immediately if I’m sitting at my desk, however busy I am. ” — Wayne Andrews, poll respondent, United Arab Emirates

“I like getting email. It is a diversion from a tough job or from a boring task. Stopping every now and then to answer email is like taking a break. If one appears to be a time waster, it gets postponed for later. ” — Lester Stephenson, poll respondent, USA

As a productivity consultant, one of my chief concerns is what most of us mistakenly call “time management.” Obviously, time comes in preset amounts for everyone and we use it up whether we like it or not, so we can’t truly manage or conserve it as we can more tangible resources. Therefore, time management actually boils down to self management. The savvy worker finds ways to use time efficiently, refusing to waste it or allow external factors to monopolize it to the detriment of workplace productivity.

In all my productivity training talks and courses, I emphasize a measured response to email and other electronic disruptions as an essential time management technique. Among other things, I teach my clients to check their email just a few times a day. It seemed natural, then, to ask my LinkedIn colleagues how often they check their email, and I did just that in a poll that ended on September 30, 2011. I received 212 formal responses; in addition, 15 people left comments, including two who didn’t vote but made their choices clear. So in all, the poll logged 214 responses.

“All Day, Every Day. I Never Turn It Off” was far and away the most common choice (N = 135), beating the runner-up, “Every Hour” (N = 29), by more than one hundred votes! It garnered a full 63% of the responses, while “Every Hour” got just 13.6%. Two other options, “2-4 Times Daily” and “5-7 Times Daily,” got 22 and 24 votes (10.3% and 11.2% of the total). “Once” came in dead last with 4 votes (1.9%).

I would love to say that these results surprise me…but they don’t, really. I’ve long been aware of the obsessive allure of email, and how it has become one of the true timewasters of the modern office. Somehow, we find it almost impossible to mitigate our Pavlovian response to incoming messages. As a result, many of us are slaves to our inboxes, afraid we might miss something important if we don’t stay connected. Most of the time, this does nothing but shoot holes in our productivity.

That said, I do recognize the fact that email represents the lifeblood of many modern businesses. They not only get most of their orders via email, they also handle customer service through the same medium. Indeed, several commenters made it clear that their job requirements determine their email habits.

This time, the seniority of the respondents split right down the middle for all voting slots, with managers, owners, and C-Suite execs responding in numbers essentially equal to the “All Others” category. Similarly, the age breakdown yielded similar statistics for all four ranges (18-29, 30-36, 37-44, and 45+), with only the “Every Hour” and “5-7 Time Daily” results displaying notable variances. People 37 or older were more than twice as likely to check email hourly as their younger colleagues, while those 30-36 led the pack in checking 5-7 times a day. But I must point out that relatively few people voted for either choice.

The gender results proved interesting as well; the only choices with significant differences were “2-4 Times Daily” (13 men vs. 4 women, or a 76%-24% split) and “All Day” (56 men vs. 46 women, or 55% and 45%). Only 160 of the 214 responders provided their genders, with a breakdown of 90 men and 70 women—a ratio of about 56% to 44%.

LinkedIn provides nationalities only for commenters, since you can link directly back to their personal pages; everyone else remains anonymous. Now, I hesitate to peg Americans as the world leaders in over-checking email, since only 15 people commented and LinkedIn remains a mostly American phenomenon…but of those 15 commenters, nine (60%) hailed from the USA. Canada provided two of the other six, with the U.K., India, Brazil, and the United Arab Emirates rounding out the total.

These poll results demonstrate clearly that over-checking email remains a huge problem. At first glance, it may not seem like such a big deal to spend a minute here and there responding to email, but numerous studies (and my own 20 years of experience) have proven that constant connectivity stifles employee productivity. It’s one thing if you have to keep your email client open all day in order to do your job; but if you don’t, then you’re just damaging your productive potential by checking, checking, and rechecking hour after hour.

As always, thanks to everyone who participated in this poll. If you didn’t get a chance to vote, I’d love to hear what you have to say…by email, ironically!