3 Vital Conditions to Be Productive Staying within Timelines
According to time management statistics for 2021, 46% of stress reported amongst employees in the US is caused by an overwhelming workload. At some point in their career, two of three employees experience extreme fatigue. When it comes to adverse effects on performance and health, the figures are worrying. For many of us, the pervasive feeling of not having enough time lies at the bottom of stress.
Time management seems to be the best way to become efficient. To minimize unproductive time gaps we tighten hour-long meetings into quickies and squeeze more tasks into gaps in our schedule. But the more productive we try to be, the more stress and pressure with less productivity we face. Let’s reveal how to antagonize the root causes of feeling distressed and disoriented — tasks, decisions, and distractions that are the back-set on our road map.
Time Management Pitfalls
The employees who work from home due to the lockdown caused by COVID-19 have illustrated the paradox of time management: three-quarters of them report that the necessity to work from home saves them time and about half of them say that their efficiency has increased.
But the companies who used to track time registered that the average workday has expanded by a full 30 minutes globally. It has shifted the work-life balance, as comes at the expense of leisure time in the evening. This is quite opposite of what we would expect from people who plan to use their time with a greater outcome.
There is the main problem of time management. Freeing up some time in your schedule looks like digging a hole on the beach, the deeper you dig, the more it fills with water. If you get more free time, you eagerly fill free space in your schedule with another project or take on an additional role instead of accommodating it with comfort to keep a life-work balance.
The following steps will power up your productivity and allow you to take time to make time, escaping the pitfalls of time management.
1. Lower Your Targets
A list of to-dos includes plenty of agreements: “I’ll call the stakeholder in the evening,” “I’ll leverage USAJobs resume builder to handle my resume for promotion tonight,” “I’ll prepare the follow-on action recommendation for tomorrow.”
Every agreement creates the pressure to deliver. A need in breaking or renegotiating the agreement adds the extra stress of a potentially difficult explanation as well as the possible guilt of upsetting the colleague. To lower the targets and hold the line upfront you should reduce the pressure from task volume not to be forced to renegotiate the agreements in the future. The solution will depend on whether a to-dos list grows down because of tasks assigned to you or of those you are eager to take on.
For agreed tasks think in terms of priorities, not time. Ask a boss whether they would like you to prioritize this against other duties to involve them in a collaborative discussion about what is most important. For tasks, you add on yourself, be realistic about your capacity not to overwhelm yourself. Look in your calendar to get a complete view of the commitments and block time for each of them. Ensure that accepting another task is essential for you and always check you have an agenda written.
2. Substitute Decisions for Principles
The past year confronted each of us with the necessity of deciding whether we should send the kids to school, or if it would be safe to visit the parents or to return to the office. Facing too many decisions that demand attention and have significant consequences at the same time leads to cognitive overload. That means that even the most intelligent people can process a limited amount of information, tasks, and decisions at a given time. Inability to cope leads to a sharp rise of errors and failures adding to feeling overwhelmed.
Reducing the cognitive load is possible if you replace decisions with your absolute principles. The absolute principle shuts the door for doubts once and for all and the need to make decisions simply disappears. One principle beats a hundred decisions, for instance, your love for white T-shirts removes the need to choose between red, black, or orange ones. The principle not to work after 6 p. m.or creating a day a week to focus without meetings saves plenty of time. By the way, at least 23 hours per week senior managers spend in meetings.
3. Minimize Distractions Using Structure
Notifications from sites, social platforms, mailboxes, and messengers steal your attention slice by slice until they break the work at all. Besides, there are more distractions that easily sidetrack us from accomplishing the tasks, such as the phone that keeps ringing, kids, friends, or colleagues, who ask to grab five minutes of our attention. Your willpower is unable to renew the workflow, and this makes us feel overwhelmed and disturbed, adding to pressure as there is no progress done.
To take the stand of many distracting factors it’s better to use structure, as it beats willpower every time. That means establishing periods for turning off Wi-Fi to focus, creating quick scheduled sessions for questions or calls to get direction, instituting a day when no meetings will be held, turning all notifications before you start the work, and taking scheduled short breaks to recover.
Summary
As you can see, conventional time management often fails to be effective in fighting overload and reducing stress. It leads us to take on even more tasks. Ask yourself from time to time how useful a new task is, if it contributes to the ultimate goal, whether it can be delegated. The best approach is not to try to become productive and choose your battles carefully.
Consider the fact that more tasks bring more decisions and distractions. Not to find yourself burnt out and crushed by a ton of work, you need a strategy to eliminate the volume of work, reduce the number of tasks, and simplify them by replacing decisions with principles as well as putting structure in place to eliminate distractions.
About the Author
Linda R. Bedford
Linda is a Professional Resume Writer and Military to Civilian Transition Specialist. Her expertise range across a large spectrum of industries. She loves coaching with people and helps job-seekers in transitioning to their next and best chapter.
