Chances are that your Calendar is already pretty full at the start of the week, and that emails alone would happily fill whatever gaps there are between meetings. The natural cadence of your working week probably keeps leading you back to the urgent over the important. And even when you do get a few minutes, you know you’ll get interruptions, or simply not have enough time to launch in to those big projects that you really want to (and need to) progress.
So what do we do? We tend to postpone the more involved pieces of work until the evening or the weekend. Although this works in the short-term, it eats in to our home and health life and for most of us it also means that we are working on the most important things when we are at our most tired and least motivated.
Deep Work
Daniel Goleman’s book “Focus” highlighting the importance of being able to concentrate on longer-term, more complex issues, avoiding the plethora of distractions aimed at us by the modern world. Cal Newport uses the term “Deep Work” to refer to those things which you really need to dedicate your focus to. The things that are at the heart of what you are there to do and which will be game changers for you and your organisation.
After all, when you really break it down, we are all paid to think and take great decisions. Do you find you are postponing the thinking part of your job, until you’ve dealt with the noise of the day and sorted out everyone else’s problems for them?
If you are clear what you want to achieve in your current role, then why not block out time in your diary for work which directly drives you towards those achievements? Shared Calendar? Great – why not block out time as “Thinking Time”? If you have the issue of being “too busy to think” then chances are other people are in the same boat. Why not lead by example and let them see you are fighting back?
Click on this link to consider a simple a technique to help time management