Who stole my day?

Guest blogger Nick Howes, Managing Director at LMI UK, outlines three simple time management and productivity ideas to turn the familiar feeling of ‘Who stole my day?’ into a sense of purposeful accomplishment.

“How was your day?”

“Fine. Busy.”

In reality it wasn’t fine. It was a bit of a nightmare. There were some good moments and small victories if you really think back through all that happened. A few really pleasant conversations and positive interactions where it felt like progress was made and things got done.

The rest of the day? A bit chaotic, to put it mildly!

You had a few really important things you wanted to get done that were clear in your mind on the journey into work, or at the breakfast table before heading to your home office / kitchen table / corner of your bedroom. Your brain was refreshed and functioning at its best and everything made good sense.

Then…

You turned on the computer and those emails just kept on coming! As well as the ones from yesterday that hadn’t been dealt with. You managed to reply to a couple straight away, deleted a few, and half-read some before your first Teams meeting.

What is this meeting about again?

The meeting slightly overran (as usual) so you were a few minutes late for the next meeting, which was back-to-back with the first.

Finally – late-morning – it’s back to those emails. A couple of replies were half-written so you had to start again on those, given that it’s three hours since you first looked at them. A dozen or more new emails to look at as well. Then the notes to go through from those two Teams meetings, which are already less clear than they seemed when you first wrote them.

Anyway, some progress until…

“Excuse me – can I borrow you for a couple of minutes?”

“Yeah, sure.”

Twenty-five minutes later, you’re back to your huge to-do list, or your inbox, or a bit of both, but only for 10 minutes before the next meeting.

You can see how this is panning out. It might seem like an exaggeration, but many tell us this is exactly how things play out for them most days. The big questions is: ‘What can we do about it?’ We still want to be helpful to colleagues and we definitely want to be positive and responsive to clients, partners and other key stakeholders.

Here are three simple ideas that can help, with the key goal in mind that you want to get to the end of your day feeling good about what you’ve achieved and the way that you’ve interacted with others. 

1. Turn off notifications!

Our brains cannot multitask. All they do is switch quickly from one thing to another and every switch has a cost associated with it, both in terms of time and brain power. The more we switch, the more we fatigue our brains and the greater impact on the quality of our work. Determine how frequently you need to check email / Teams chat / Slack / WhatsApp etc to maintain high quality service and set times in between when you can go offline and concentrate fully on the task in hand.

If turning everything off seems way too daunting, begin with one channel and see how it goes. Determine to proactively check messages routinely when you’re in-between other activities and respond in batches. Think of it a bit like washing up! If you stack plates, cups and cutlery on the side and then fill the bowl to wash everything at one time, it’s much more efficient than washing up every cup, plate and spoon individually.

2. Make use of focus time

As mentioned above, task-switching takes its toll. Imagine a one-hour lesson at school. Let’s say it’s a geography lesson, 10am – 11am. It takes time to get into the class and put the subject of the previous lesson out of mind and concentrate now on rivers and erosion. That focused, one-hour period is sufficient to learn something new, reflect, discuss, understand and then move on to the next lesson.

Imagine if every five minutes throughout that hour, another teacher popped their head around the door – just for two minutes – to quickly relay some information about their subject. That broken-up hour would be utterly ineffective. Even if the teacher still managed to get through the material, the quality of learning, understanding and retention would be extremely low. And yet we conduct our working lives exactly this way much of the time!

Do whatever it takes to get at least two uninterrupted, focused periods each day to work on your most important projects. Ideally an hour, but start with shorter slots if you need to, and build up. Even 20 minutes of focus time can make a huge difference. The evidence suggests that uninterrupted time is (at least) four times more productive than when you are regularly distracted.

3. Ten Magic Minutes

When you get into a proper, old-school taxi (not an Uber where everything is pre-booked), what’s the first question you get asked?

“Where to?”

Imagine your reply being: “Look, I’m busy and I’m late. Don’t ask me stupid questions. Just drive!”

That would make no sense at all. It would cost you time and money, but you could end up anywhere. You’d never do that! But have you ever arrived at your desk and just started getting on with work – just driving, to follow the analogy – without first deciding where you wanted to get to?

The simple practice of Ten Magic Minutes is transformational. Set a countdown timer for 10 minutes on your phone or computer and leave it where you can see the time counting down. During this time you are not to do anything except think about the day ahead and make a plan.

Decide on your A-list: things you must do today. Then create your B-list: things to do today if possible and only when the A-list is complete. Schedule time for your A-list activities. Schedule open time for responding to colleagues, handling emails, etc.

Your daily plan serves two main purposes:

• It gives you a clear direction for your day and helps you to sort the really important things – the must-dos – from the nice-to-dos, and helps you stay focused on what really matters.
• It also gives you a plan to come back to when you are, inevitably, sidetracked by those urgent, crisis moments when you do have to drop everything and respond. Rather than getting lost into a spiral of reactivity, you can get straight back to your most important tasks.

When you accomplish meaningful work during the day, it has a positive knock-on effect into our evening. We feel less fatigued and have more physical and mental energy to take into the non-work part our lives, which is a win for us and our friends and family.

We can’t magically change the whole world by next Tuesday, but we can, though small and consistent changes, turn ‘Who stole my day?’ into a sense of purposeful accomplishment.

Nick Howes, Managing Director at Leadership Management International (LMI) UK
July 2023

_________________________________________________________________________________________

If your organisation has a recruitment/resource challenge or requirement that , you can get in touch with us here – we’d love to hear from you.

You can also find us on LinkedIn at THINK Consulting Solutions and on Twitter @ThinkCS, where we share useful industry insights.