I am sure most of you have felt like the day is just getting longer and longer and the outstanding tasks, items, paperwork or deliverables are just piling on, and everything needs to get done today!
You are not alone, and there are some tips and tricks that I utilise to get through these days a bit easier and a bit saner on the other end.
If I can use a sports analogy, think about your list of tasks / things to be done during the day as an uphill that you need to cycle. As most cyclists will tell you, you can be as fit as you want to be but in order to master these climbs you need time in the saddle. Time in the saddle for you means you will have to practice getting through these long days in order to eventually get through them easier and hopefully quicker, basically just churn, rinse and repeat aka The Churn.
“The churn” will work like this: You most probably have some sort of task list or system that you are comfortable with using to track your activities that you need to complete today. Using this system organise your – let’s call them tasks for ease of reference first thing in the morning into groups, for instance group your tasks by client or by location or even by whether it is a “personal” task vs a “work” task.
Now organise these groups of tasks in order of priority for instance, the locations closest to you should take priority, work tasks are more important than personal tasks etc. With a little bit of practise, you should be able to do this quite quickly in the morning and get going with your day in a matter of minutes.
And here is where it gets interesting, as the day goes by you will get more and more tasks added to your list. Most of the time you would like to think that these should be completed the same day, but as with previous activity with a little bit of practise you will be able to differentiate between tasks that are required now, and tasks that can stay over for a day. Needless to say as these tasks come in you need to arrange them in their group and ensure that you put it at the bottom of the list – the golden rule here is if you can’t resolve something within 5-10 min it goes into your tasks list, the task then gets grouped by whatever you decided in the beginning, and then gets put at the BOTTOM of that group.
When you are “churning” through your tasks remember to focus on the group you are working in and don’t worry about the rest of the tasks that are still there. Remember you are working on the most important tasks first, so if anything, you are churning through the items that are most critical. Once you have completed a group of tasks you move on to the next group and focus ONLY on that group until it is finished and so on until you have moved through all the groups.
It is also very likely that you might get side tracked with an urgent request that needs to be handled right now. In such cases where you cannot complete the task immediately and it falls into a higher priority group than the one you are working on, don’t panic, just put that specific task in the group and once your’e done with your current group of tasks, move back to the higher priority group of tasks and just churn through them again.
Keep on churning, and pretty soon you will realise that the day is not that long anymore and with a little bit of focus and practise you will be able to get a lot more done using some of these tricks. When you feel overwhelmed and don’t know where to start, just rinse and repeat from the beginning and restart working through the most important groups ignoring any other tasks that are not in that group and only adding new tasks if you cannot complete them in 5 – 10 minutes.
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