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Triple your productivity. Forget the power!
It’s a Wednesday night and you are home with the laptop and a bucket of work still to do and you know it’s going to take you till midnight to simply get through the email. Dinner is dragging on you like a terrier gnawing to your pants leg. The children want attention and your spouse is on the phone to cousin Archie discussing why you can never find a copy of Disney’s “Song of the South” in any DVD store. It’s going to be a long night so you might as well get started.
You open the laptop wondering how Jack Bauer can save the United States from multiple groups of terrorists in 24 hours and you can’t get your laptop to boot up in under 20 minutes. As this thought flickers through your mind you reach into your laptop bag and search for the single most important thing that will keep you going through the evening. You turn white as you realize that what you are reaching for is under your desk lying on the floor completely useless. (Much like the last employee newsletter) You have forgotten your laptop’s power cord!
So, much like a bad reality game show, you realize that what you expected to take you eight hours will have to be done in the 3:26 minutes that your laptop battery calculator is telling you are all the time left till your laptop dies in your fingertips.
So begins the best lesson in work conservation, focus, expediency, and practical prioritization you will ever have in your life. For in that time you will not do what you normally do.
- You will not take breaks to stretch and get a sip of water
- You will not respond to emails as they were received
- You will not put things into piles to focus on later (seven times)
- You will not ponder, revise, ponder, revise, ponder.
- You will not sweat the small stuff.
What is even more important is that in a simple exercise of self preservation…in the deepening awareness that somewhere a person with a V. and a P. somewhere in their title is going to be looking at what you get done tonight. You make leaps of developmental awareness.
What you will do:
- You will focus on the critical tasks before you as though time were a commodity (it is).
- You will make clear, rational decisions without over thinking trivial issues.
- You will prioritize your work to ensure the important things are focused on first.
- You will delegate responsibility. “Honey, get off the phone and put the kids to bed!”
- You will hold people accountable. “Honey are the kids in bed yet?”
What will happen will amaze you. Not only do I predict that you will get the time critical things done…you will most likely get it all done. Furthermore, I predict that your work will be cleaner, more precise, and effective. Your inbox will be empty and that 32 page PowerPoint presentation will be exactly what was needed. (it had to be, you didn’t have the time to over think an additional 50 slides)
The lessons are obvious to any executive coach. They better be since they charge $1200 bucks a day. But, in that one focused experience you have discovered what you needed to know. That much of your day (and the days of your employees) is spent doing repetitive, non-productive, unfocused activities. You have realized that mega corporations did just fine before email, Microsoft Office, and AIM. Much of this has become a distraction much like all of the things that surround us. Structuring, prioritizing, delegating, and cutting through the electronic crap that fills our workday is as easy as a laptop on borrowed time. There are a thousand lessons you can see from this example and I can tell you its a true story. The bigger lesson is when the person took the laptop home the next evening with the power cord, the nights work went past midnight. Thinking through our work as though time was not on our side instead of an open window to get things done can truly make you more productive and actually help ensure that when you do get home you can focus on the things that really matter….family.
Copyright © 2010 Mike Baumgartner | HR | Consulting | Coach | Human Resources | Search - CEO, Worklife Survival Center LLC
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