Is most of your work-day filled with purpose?
Do you know where your time goes and what your effort goes towards?
Does every day have a to-do list that never get fully ticked off?
I met with someone recently who told me that although in a senior role, they felt they were pretty much wholly operational. Their whole focus felt like ‘stuff’ without a lot of substance. They were stuck in the muck.
It’s a common refrain.
But if we’re not working on the strategic and important we end up feeling like meaning is missing. We’re not doing what matters.
We all have the same amount of time in our day. So how is it that some people seem to manage it better? It seems to be less about managing time and more about managing self.
A great way of working out how you spend your day and when you are at your most productive is to time track. There are plenty of productivity apps for this of course, but I’ve found that often a piece of paper with a line for every 15 minutes in my bag or on my desk is enough. Usually within a couple of weeks you can see your patterns and what is swallowing up space in your day.
For me, what it told me is that like many people, my most productive time, my best #thinking time, is the first hours of the day (read more about this in Donna McGeorge’s great new book The First Two Hours) so I try to set an intention at the end of each work day about what I want to get done inside that productive window. When I get into work that’s all I do. No emails. No socials. No phone calls before 10 or 11am. And because I find being with people energises me (card carrying extrovert) I schedule meetings for the afternoons.
How do you help yourself stay focussed on the substance? Share your ideas below in the comments.