Relieve Workflow Overwhelm
Mary was struggling with her workflow…feeling overwhelmed with so much to do and so little time. Haven’t we all had that dilemma? I asked her to bring her Outlook calendar that showed every detail of her daily work activities for the past month.
When we sat down together in our coaching session, the aha for her was that as a social person she was spending time too much time at lunches, meetings, on committees, handling email (much of it was unrelated to her job), etc. etc. So, here’s how we cleaned up her daily activities.
#1 – She moved all emails that were not work related to another email account. Things like forwards, cute notes from friends who meant well but disrupted her work flow, advertisements from places she had shopped telling the latest and greatest bargains (and for which she admittedly had filled out at the time of purchase to receive the info) and finally, things she wanted to still receive as information but could “read later.”
This seemed such a little thing…but helped her tremendously.
#2 – We looked at where she wanted to focus her time and realized that she was on committees and at meetings that simply were not necessary. So we developed a plan to stay focused on “keeping the main things the main things.” At the end of our coaching session, she happily walked out of my office feeling a ton of bricks had been removed. All simple actions, but the caution is that we all get into habits and activities as we just keep going down our merry path, wondering why we aren’t as productive as we would like. Take time to reflect on what you are doing. And how you could shave some things out of your activities in order to raise your productivity level.
Certainly, there is much more Mary can do, but I wanted to quickly share these two things in hopes her experience might resonate with you as valuable insight that you can use.
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Valerie
