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Make an appointment with yourself!

Finding the time we need to fit everything into an increasingly busy workday seems to be an issue for almost everyone we have spoken to. There are lots of things that we want to do and nowhere near enough time to do the things we NEED to! So how do you develop a technique to make better use of your already limited time?

A few months ago, at the suggestion of a colleague, we developed a forward-planning technique at Elite Edge to prioritise our workloads. The idea was to develop a technique which would allow us to reduce the time we spent being distracted or sidelined into ‘fire fighting’ and also that would allow us to proactively manage the work we knew should be prioritised.

By treating priority projects as ‘meetings with ourselves’ we now block out the time necessary to complete the work as an ‘appointment’ in our diaries. In doing so, these projects are given a higher priority than simply being recorded on our individual ‘to do’ lists. Forcing ourselves to keep these meetings, much like we’d do with a client meeting, we prevent the work being carried over to the next day or even week.

By listing everything you need to do (important and not-so-important-but-still-necessary) and plotting the activities as meetings on your calendar, you can then allocate the time required well in advance to deal with each project – you just need to commit to keeping the ‘appointments’ and updating your diary. This should hopefully keep you focused and avoid wasting too much time being distracted with fire fighting and other less important tasks.

There will still be urgent jobs which require your immediate attention, but hopefully these won’t take up quite so much of your time if you remain focused on keeping your important appointments. The urgent jobs are the emergencies and unexpected problems that come up every day which can consume a disproportionate amount of our productive time. They may not necessarily further the business whilst the important things are the work, tasks and projects that have a direct impact on your business growth.

Be serious about your appointments with yourself - don’t allow interruptions - and you will be surprised at how much more you achieve throughout the day.