60 useful seconds with kalaboukis

While a paper planner is great, you also need an electronic one which you can use to book calls and meetings with others. I personally use Google Calendar, which has more or less become a standard. You can use add-ons like Calendly in order to send people your availability dates so that you can book meetings. ALWAYS book meetings. Even if your meeting attendees do not use Google Calendar, their own systems should readily convert a Google Calendar invite to whatever system they use.  support the show: https://anchor.fm/60usefulseconds/support

As I’ve made in some of the points above, writing things into a paper planner and ink will help you to commit to tasks and follow through with them. Additionally, the added benefit of using all three sensory modalities in the writing process will help you to remember the tasks themselves.  support the show: https://anchor.fm/60usefulseconds/support

A corollary to the above, getting away from “people distractions” could take you away from the office or away from home (wherever your main workplace is) – go to a coffee shop or library – or somewhere where there are no other people around. Even a park might work, as long as you have a decent internet connection. Sometimes I find that the lobby of the city hall in your nearest town has great internet, and it’s not a bad place to have a conference call, and long as you are not too loud  support the show: https://anchor.fm/60usefulseconds/support

This is a holdover from the days when I used to run IT organizations. Usually, many of my colleagues at my clients would take time off over holiday breaks.I found that is the most productive time for me – as I mentioned in my 4 am post, one of the best times to work, is when no one else is working. It may be a sad commentary, but, paraphrasing Sartre, sometimes “time-wasting is other people” There is nothing like stepping into an almost empty office, and solidly focusing on work, with no distractions of other people asking you to do this or that. If you have a solid set of work to do, try NOT taking time off over the holidays, like your co-workers – you will be surprised by what you can get done.  support the show: https://anchor.fm/60usefulseconds/support

There are some cases where you will want to purposefully delay a task because you know that once you complete the task, then follow up work from that task will occur which will require a certain amount of work in response. For example, there is one colleague who I know will ask me for additional work once I contact him. So I ensure that I contact him when I have a window to perform the additional work. A strategically procrastinate in my response so that I will have free time right after I contact him, just in case additional work is forthcoming. If the work doesn’t come, then all the better.    support the show: https://anchor.fm/60usefulseconds/support

For this task – you need to try to sense yourself – to be in tune with what works best for you right now, and only undertake that task. For example, let’s say that like most people, you are most awake, aware, and alert at 10 am. If that is the case, don’t schedule some boring meeting at that time, schedule something more challenging or fulfilling. Use the best time of day for each task – don’t push your most challenging tasks to the afternoon when you are most tired. If you have to do random, mindless paperwork, do it when you maybe not as sharp. The key is to detect your current mental state and match the state to the work. If some of the work needs to be postponed until you are in a better mental state, then so be it.  support the show: https://anchor.fm/60usefulseconds/support

While the internet has basically has been designed from the ground up for random browsing, try to detect when you have strayed from the productivity path which you have set for yourself, when you are browsing the net. The moment you open up an internet browser, you should kick your spidey sense into high gear: Is this important? Does this page help me with my research/core vision? I’m getting what I need? Am I wasting time? Basically, you need to take your mindfulness training and apply it to the unsafe space which is the internet browser.  support the show: https://anchor.fm/60usefulseconds/support

There are times when your phone is an essential business tool, and there are times when it’s a huge time suck. If you are having trouble regulating your phone use and it is sucking up your productive time in non-productive tasks, just put the thing away. If you can’t do that, go ahead and delete all applications from your phone which suck up your productivity. Go on, do it now. I can wait.  support the show: https://anchor.fm/60usefulseconds/support

Always have an agenda for every meeting which you circulate at least 24 hours prior to the meeting. Give people enough information so that they can make a decision to determine if it is worth their while to attend. Feel free to cancel the meeting if you aren’t able to pull in the key personnel you need. Always come at meetings from a value proposition angle – is it really worth it to gather all of these people into this meeting for this length of time? Think of the time value of all of these people in this meeting, and if you are going to be able to extract enough value. Additionally, during the meeting, constantly look for this – is a discussion is off topic but is still adding value – let it go and guide it to a conclusion – or if it’s going off track – book another meeting with a subset to discuss.  support the show: https://anchor.fm/60usefulseconds/support

Meetings are typically the biggest time wasters, and few are truly necessary. If you can do something about the number of meetings or the number of attendees or both – do so. Or even have shorter meetings – is there a real need for meetings to be exactly 60 minutes or exactly 30 minutes. Personally, I book the shortest possible meeting with the fewest possible people right in the middle of any other meetings that they might have in order to ensure that nothing runs long. If you are running the meeting, feel free to be a hardass a make sure that people stick to the agenda.  support the show: https://anchor.fm/60usefulseconds/support