Do you often find yourself with a brimming in-tray and an inbox that is full of unanswered emails?
This is a common situation and one which can easily cause stress to rise up and take over proceedings. The best way to move forward and get through this type of situation is to focus on positivity and to manage your time as effectively as possible.
There are many time management techniques you can try, but one very successful option is the 3 Ds.
These are:
Shortly we’re going to talk through each of the Ds, but first, you need to pull everything out of your in-tray and your inbox and assess just how much work you have. It might be a painful process, but by doing this you can truly organise yourself and get more done in the time you have. When it comes to using specific productivity hacks, you have to face the truth of your workload situation at your office desks, no matter how much it makes you cringe!
Option 1 - Do
If there are any tasks which can be done in under 10 minutes, do them now and get rid of them. You’d be surprised how many quick tasks are sitting there waiting to be done, but they get muddled up with all the other tasks you need to do and seem a bigger deal than they really are.
It’s important to assess this realistically - make sure a task which can be done in under 10 minutes can be done comfortably and to a high quality. Anything which isn’t going to realistically fit into 10 minutes should fall into one of the other two categories.
Option 2 - Delegate
If you are in a position to do so, work out if any of the tasks you have before you can be delegated to someone else. If you have someone sitting in an office chair close to you who is able to do a task far better than you, e.g, they have specialist skills, pass that over and focus on the tasks which your skills are better suited to.
If your role doesn’t allow you to delegate, speak to your manager about any tasks which you believe you either don’t have the time for, or which you think someone else could complete more effectively.
Option 3 - Defer
By ‘defer’ we don’t mean ‘put off until another time and never actually do’. We mean defer until a better time, but schedule it in now so that you don’t end up not doing it in the end.
Any tasks which take more than 10 minutes and which cannot be delegated to someone else fall into the defer category. For each one, work out how long that task is realistically going to take you and open your schedule or calendar. Schedule in a particular time to complete that task, taking particular care to ensure that you put aside the right amount of time to ensure it is done correctly and properly.
You should then file the necessary paperwork pertaining to that task in a specific system, e.g. you could use one of the modern office cupboards and set up a ‘bring forward’ system. This allows you to move scheduled work out of your in-tray, but also keep it somewhere you can easily find it when the scheduled spot comes around.
You will be surprised just how effective the 3 Ds can be when it comes to organising your time and ensuring deadlines are met. The other point is that by moving things out of your in-tray and either completing them there and then or scheduling a time to actually complete them later, you’re de-stressing as a result. Having a pile of work in front of you is not only overwhelming but it can visually cause you to feel like you can’t move in any direction. By organising yourself in this way, you’ll feel in control of your workload as a result.