It's easy to get caught up in a constant cycle of reactivity and back-to-back meetings, leaving little room for personal growth and reflection. But it doesn't have to be this way. By taking intentional steps to carve out dedicated time for ourselves, we can break free from the chaos and make space for what's truly important. In this blog post, we will delve into various strategies to reclaim your time, including deep dives, sprints, creating a "not to do" list, and setting meaningful goals for the future. So, let's embark on this journey together and discover how to prioritize our time and create a life that aligns with our deepest values and aspirations. Now, let's dive in and explore these transformative strategies for reclaiming your time and living a more intentional life.
Well, we just finished teaching a bunch of Working Sm@rt + Teams classes over the last four months, and while I'm a little tired of explaining the difference between Teams, a team, a chat, and a channel (really Microsoft???), I'm more jazzed than ever about this tool and the potential productivity gains when people use it well!
As more and more of us are working from home or a hybrid model, keeping in touch and working together as a team has become a top priority. Enter Microsoft Teams - a tool that makes it super easy to stay connected, organized, and on top of your game. Let's dive into some of the amazing benefits MS Teams has to offer for all your project work needs.
I recently moved into a new house and found myself evaluating a room that's needs painting. "Is the color close enough to avoid a primer? It would save time to jump right to a coat of the new stuff. But would it really if I had to add a second coat because the old color showed through? Ok, time for a base coat of primer!"
That same day I found myself teaching our Influencing class to a group of front line managers and it occurred to me that the same conversation applied. You cannot skip the base coat! All the fancy influencing approaches fall flat if you haven't checked the boxes on these top five fundamentals of influencing:
Person A: How’s it going?
Person B: I’m insanely busy.
Person A: Yeah, me too. I’m scheduling into next year already.
Person B: I get it. I haven’t taken a real unplugged vacation since before Covid.
Person A: I hear you. I'm not sure how much longer I can keep this up.
Person B: I know. I'm considering leaving. I'm so burnt out.
And just like that, we are falling back into the patterns of pre-pandemic workplace and homelife imbalance. Our hybrid office culture has brought with it a pace and volume of both communications and information that would overload anyone. Financial upheaval, supply chain issues, talent shortages and overtaxed healthcare systems have workplaces feeling more overwhelmed than ever. So, we respond by trying to simply catch it. How do we catch it?
What???
"She must have that backwards! For years she's been teaching us to slow down to speed up and now she says it’s the other way around?"
Every day I ask people to invest in themselves and their process improvement. This requires slowing down, learning, tweaking, changing process, and changing behavior so that they might accelerate their growth and results.
Today it occurred to me that people are not always truly leveraging their results to move the biggest rocks. Learning to triage and process email twice as fast has very little impact if you use the time saved to do low priority items. Only by taking that extra time and using it to slow down will you truly achieve quantum leaps.
How do you slow down?
So, you just got Microsoft Teams...now what? It’s just another Skype, right? Not really.
We've all heard it by now. The low-pitched "ding" that comes through your speakers, usually accompanied by a concurrent purple pop-up window. It can mean lots of things - a response to a question that you have been needing to get answered, more work that you need to complete - or random chatter from a distribution list that you have never signed up for. But dig a little deeper, and things can start to get messy. There's a flurry of IMs coming through, and you can't keep up. Or you've been added to channels than you don’t even recognize, and you don’t know why. Or you get notified any time a file or tab gets added to a team, and you have no idea if you should ignore it or if you are suddenly missing something important that you need to be diligently checking.
So, the big question becomes: Is Microsoft Teams a productivity goldmine or a reactivity trap?
The votes are in for 2019 most popular blog! This blog is full of tips for taking your work relationships to a new level of success. Be sure to take advantage of the download "Know Your Colleagues"!
I was coaching a client last week and asked about his progress since he went to our WorkingSm@rt class. He said, "Well, I'm more organized and more focused but I haven't solved the one issue that takes up more time than almost anything else -- the people stuff!”.
I knew he was saying it tongue in cheek, but he winced a little as he said it and I knew there was more truth there than he was comfortable with. I wish I could say it was the first time I've heard this complaint, but it's not. It's impossible to focus on people's productivity without consistently running into the challenging people issues that can take up significant chunks of our day.
So, without ado, I thought I’d outline three people areas that waste significant time in our workplaces with a few solutions that can make a significant impact:
Automate your repetitive processes.
Identifying all repetitive tasks in a process is a great way to quickly surface opportunities for automation.
Consider templates, checklists and rules in Outlook, Gmail, OneNote, Keep and other applications as a non-programmers option for automating. With increases in communications, an automated process for client contacts can save a team a bunch of time. Scheduling applications like Fullslate, AppointmentPlus, Acuity, TimeTap and Bookings (free in MS 365) can save everyone on the team countless hours playing phone tag and emailing people with new appointment options when you work with external clients or vendors whose schedules you can't see.
It's in my blood! I grew up in a family that rewarded it. For many years I believed it was responsible for everything good in my life. I have always put it in my top 3 values and traits. And, I now believe (and it kills me to say so) that I was wrong. In fact, it may be my biggest limitation in achieving both my professional and personal goals. While I have spent years jumping in and working more and harder when things get dicey, I realized now that this hard work ethic has, at times, caused me to:
- Make the wrong prioritizing decisions at times when my health, my family life and my spiritual needs were on the line.
- Become judgmental when others chose differently.
- Measure "hours in play" instead of results.