“You cannot achieve everything, certainly not at the same time. There are only so many hours in the day, only so many issues that any person can be expert on, only so much access that you can enjoy, only so many decisions that an organization can make. Priorities matter; sequence, too, can be terribly important. The key is to focus – something that takes real discipline, since in a typical day you might be confronted with more than a dozen issues, as many phone calls, several meetings, and inches of paper to read.”
(from Richard N. Haas, The Bureaucratic Entrepreneur. How to be effective in any unruly organizations, Brookings Institution Press, 1999)
Too true! Although, on some days it is difficult to prioritise because everything is important and urgent. On those hectic days the only solution is to organise the daily schedule in a logical and sequential way. My personal tips are:
– Plan your route when visiting other offices in a way that you accomplish multiple tasks whilst you are away from your office.
– Avoid using your office as a central node and having to come and go continuously for every different task. The “star network” theory is efficient for computer networks, not for humans. Especially in large organisations, with hundreds of employees, this must rate as the biggest time waster of all.
– Schedule visits to your office as so to avoid critical times of the day like lunch or tea breaks, maternal/paternal leave, etc. Also, try to set time limits for each visit in order to avoid idle chit chat which is probably the second worst enemy of your deadlines. Also, for good measure, try to avoid answering the phone when you have colleagues who are waiting for instructions, third worst minute eater for everyone concerned.
– At a more practical level try, when working with your computer, open in advance the programs you need for a particular task/project. If you open them in the specific order you refer to them you will have them ready and waiting in your taskbar in the right order. It will greatly speed up your work as people don’t realise how many mouse-miles we do each day. If you can learn drag-and-drop techniques (try dragging an email into your outlook calendar and see what happens) and keyboard shortcuts then even better and it will save you from RSI symptoms too.
– If you have the luxury of owing a smartphone then learn to use its full potential. It is easy to integrate emails, sync office schedules and much more. You can basically run a business directly from these gems of technology and they are literally your office in your pocket.