MAKE YOUR OWN MAGIC

Do you have days where all you seem to do is go to meeting after meeting – not only are you not knocking off your current tasks, you’re adding to them! 

I think the toughest days are the ones with a half hour meeting, half hour break, half hour meeting, half hour break. All that standing up and sitting down is good for a shapely set of thighs, but no good for getting anything done…by the time you’ve got back to your desk and checked your emails you’re off to your next meeting.

When I can, I like to back my meetings onto each other – a day with 3 hours of meetings at the start, one after the other, then a whole afternoon free - way more productive than 6 half hour meetings with 6 half hour breaks in between. Add in a set of lunges and the thighs won’t suffer :-)

If you can influence it, try it! 

How good is it to watch a movie when there are no ad breaks?  To take an hour of your day to read a book with no-one calling you?  Arrive at work without having hit a single red light? Start a task at work and get all the way to the end without a single interruption?  Ok so the first two are achievable, the third one is a lucky break and the last one is almost impossible… but here is one easy thing you can do to help with #4… turn off your email notifications.

It’s such a simple thing - but I promise the ramifications to both your productivity and to your feelings of control at work are huge.

Here’s the truth… in most businesses, people DON’T expect you to get straight back to them - if they did, and it if was urgent, they would call you.  They cope when you’re in a meeting, when you’re at the doctors, they can cope for an hour while you get something done.  We set other peoples’ expectations by responding immediately, we can and should change this habit.

Microsoft’s research has indicated that it takes you 15 minutes to get back into what you were doing after an interruption so your email notifications can easily start controlling you rather than the other way around.  Doing a half hour task can take you twice as long if you get drawn away from it a couple of times.

Try turning ALL your email notifications off.

If you’re nervous, just try it for a week and see how you feel - checking your emails when YOU feel like it, rather than every time you hear that cheerful little “bong” or see that little pop up envelope. Have your calendar as your default screen so you can’t even see your inbox unless you choose to go there.

It is nothing short of a revelation to both start and finish a task without your email tempting you in… I admit this is only one of many interruptions at work, but this one you can 100% control.

This week is a shocker - it’s official!

You know this sort of week - it’s the one where you feel like you’re sinking but the emails just keep coming, someone wants to chat “just for 5 minutes”, you’re already planning to come in at 6am/stay til 6am/all of the above.  Yarrgh!

This week is one for me - this week my poor husband is in hospital with appendicitis, bored and sore and not sure what his body is up to - so I’m balancing visiting and working, emails, calls, hungry cocker spaniels and driving around Sydney sourcing things to keep bored husbands from going crazy.

The basics will save me this week, and here for your delight (and thoughts) they are:

- Prioritise… I know what the 3-4 most urgent & important things are that I need to get done before I go to bed, the rest will be delegated or will just have to wait.

- Plan… make your to-do list for today, start at the top, don’t get distracted by the stuff you’re not doing - I love Microsoft Outlook tasks for this because you can have a list that’s just today’s tasks, and minimise all those 500 other distracting tasks away under “tomorrow and beyond”… et voila - focus!

- Promulgate… ridiculous word, but I wanted another “P” and it apparently (according to the thesaurus I just quizzed) means “make known” - my lovely work know it’s a nasty week for me, they are being kind, but they can’t be kind if they don’t know.  It’s not about making excuses, but it is about managing expectations.

- Procrastinate… just joking, I’d better get back to work!

“Make your own magic” is about understanding what has made today a really great day and making it happen again.

The point is you don’t just have to let things happen to you - you can make choices that will make a positive impact… for me my great days are when I’ve fitted in everything I want to do, work and personal, and that’s grounded in effective time management.

It comes down to 2 things - positive attitude & self awareness.

A positive attitude can completely change your day - positive moods are directly linked to positive thought, behaviours and results.

So here’s my thing for today - take 5 minutes for yourself - take 5 at the beginning of the day and decide “today is going to be a great day” and 5 at the end to look back on what you’ve achieved - keep the behaviours that brought you success, change the ones that didn’t.

An interesting Harvard Business Review article on the last 5 minutes here: http://blogs.hbr.org/bregman/2011/01/the-best-way-to-use-the-last-f.html