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Bad Habits

You have now defined your goals and you know where your time is being spent.

Your next step is to review your activities and find out what your personal time-eating habits are. If you can break those habits, you can make more time for yourself.

Identifying Your Time-Eating Habits

A time-eating habit is a pattern of behavior that wastes your time or distracts you from your goals.

Below are some of the most common time-eating habits. You can review your activity logs to find out if one of these habits affects you.

If you identify a time-eating habit, you need to break it. Concentrate on breaking one habit at a time, or you will become overwhelmed. Read on to find out how to spot and break these patterns.

Procrastination

Symptoms

You have an important task that intimidates you and that you are putting off.

Your activity log may contain too many secondary or wish tasks, because you are avoiding one of your critical tasks.

Take action

Avoidance won't make it any easier, so you're going to have to bite the bullet and start the job that intimidates you.

Here are some ways you could approach it.

  • Write down what you are trying to achieve. It may seem more approachable on paper than in your head.
  • Break a big job down into smaller, manageable chunks.
  • Get someone else involved. A second viewpoint may make the task less intimidating.
  • If you don't have the right skills, sign up for a course or in-house training.
  • Get started on an easy part. Once you have made a start, it will be easier to continue.

If you still need help, a professional coach or an encouraging colleague can help motivate you.

Over-Helpfulness

Symptoms

You never say "no" when someone asks you for help. Much of your time is spent on tasks that help other people achieve their goals, but don't help you achieve yours.

Take action

A common time-eating habit is to sideline your own tasks in order to help other people.

Helping out often makes you popular and it can make you indispensable in your current position. However, it doesn't help you achieve your professional goals. You can keep helping out but, if possible, try to spend less than 10% of your time on it.

Here are some practical ways to cut down.

  • Value your own work and goals. Make sure the goals you set for yourself are genuinely important to you. Regularly review them – it's your responsibility to meet them.
  • If someone asks you for help, rather than taking on the job on youself, offer training, advice and feedback on their results. At first, this may take longer than doing it yourself, but it will save time in the longer term.

Distraction By Email

Symptoms

In your activity log, email-reading is one of your biggest overall activities and you read emails throughout the day.

Take action

Email can be very distracting, particularly if you let new incoming mails break your concentration.

Here are some ways to use email more effectively

  • If possible, review new emails only at set times; for example, first thing, after lunch and at the end of the day.
  • Turn off email notifications. Email notifications tempt you to stop your productive work and open your inbox. (To turn off Outlook notifications go to Tools->Options and on the Preferences tab click the "Email Options" button. Now click the "Advanced Email Options" button. Ensure the 4 options in the section entitled "when new items arrive in my inbox" are unticked.)

You can train your team in more effective email communication. Here are some guidelines.

  • Keep emails as short and targeted as possible. For example, don't write a long email for a wide audience, break it up into several short emails, targeted and sent to smaller groups.
  • Recipients shouldn't need to open an email to find out what it's about - the subject should tell them. "About our meeting" is a bad subject. "About next Monday's meeting on the 2005 sales figures" is much better.
  • Every email should have a clear "call to action" - recipients should know exactly what they are expected to do. A good call to action might be, "I need you to read this email and answer the four questions today". If there are different calls to action for different recipients, consider sending separate emails.
  • Be clear what "cc" means on emails. Recipients can interpret "cc" as meaning anything from "read this email immediately" to "maybe read this email someday". If a recipient must perform an action (even reading the email) it is usually better to include them on the "to" line.
  • Email is not an efficient means of instant communication. To contact someone urgently, use an instant messaging client or the phone.

An excellent guideline is: write emails for the maximum convenience of the recipient.

Under-Delegation

Symptoms

Your activity log contains tasks that a subordinate could do, with the right training.

Take action

Delegation is the process of transfering your work to someone whose time is less valuable. You may have to train someone before they can take on your tasks and complete them to the required standard.

For each activity in your log, consider:

  • Is there a subordinate or someone less busy who could do this task?
  • If they can't do it now, could I train them to do it?

Look for a task you spend more than 30 minutes on, per week. If you could train someone less valuable to do it, then train them and delegate it.

Below are some common concerns that can lead to under-delegation.

  • It would take longer to train someone than to do it myself. In the short-term that's almost certainly correct, but in the long term you'll have more time and better staff.
  • Someone else won't do it as well as me. That's probably true. However, is the high quality you achieve really necessary? Could you do something more worthwhile with that time?
  • I know should delegate this task, but I enjoy it. If you delegate a fun job, it will make your staff happier and more willing to take on dull jobs.
  • The task keeps me in touch with my staff. Instead of doing the task yourself, ask your delegate to brief you regularly on their progress. That way you can remain in touch with the task, while giving your delegate extra support, training and feedback.
  • My team is too busy to take on extra work. In the short term, you may want to take pressure off your team by doing some of their work yourself. However, that won't improve the long-term situation. Instead, spend the time looking for ways to reduce their work load. You could recruit new staff, improve training or change processes and workflows.

Doing Ineffective Tasks

Symptoms

There are tasks in your activity log that don't pay off – they don't help you achieve your goals.

Take action

An excellent way to free up time is to drop ineffective activities.

  • An activity should be dropped if it doesn't help you achieve a goal. For each of your activities consider: if I dropped this task and used the time on something more critical, would I be better off?
  • Meetings with few or no results are a very ineffective use of your time. Only attend meetings with agendas, assigned actions and results. Most other meetings are pointless.

Stopping and Starting on Tasks

Symptoms

Your activity log contains lots of very short tasks and you frequently switch away from tasks without completing them.

Take action

Studies show a broken task takes 30% longer than a task you complete in one go.

If you are constantly being interrupted and forced to move from task to task, try to identify the root cause and reduce its impact.

For example, if you are constantly interrupted by questions, set aside specific times for answering non-urgent questions. Request that outside those times, people interrupt you only for urgent issues.

Not Focusing on Critical Goals

Symptoms

You spend considerable time on secondary and wish goals and not enough on your critical goals.

Take action

Keep your goal list up to date and review it regularly. At the start of each task, consider the goal you are working towards. If it isn't critical, are you giving the task too high a priority? Can you defer or drop it? Also, don't complete a non-critical task to a higher standard than absolutely necessary.

You could consider limiting non-critical tasks to certain days or times. For example, you could restrict non-critical tasks to Fridays.

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