Does this sound familiar to you?
You spend an hour on Sunday afternoon planning your activities for the week. You have several important projects that will consume all of your time, and you are planning your entire week around them. Fifteen minutes after you get to work Monday morning, you get an urgent request that rearranges your schedule for the day, which leads to a major disruption of your plan for the rest of the week. You frantically work through lunch the rest of the week, and even put in late hours for on two evenings trying to catch up. Your stress level goes way up and your production actually goes down.
This is called living in a time management crisis. It can hit any of us occasionally, but some of us seem to experience this desperate dash for survival week after week after week until it becomes an unpleasant but inevitable way of life. You know you are stuck in a Time Management Crisis Syndrome when:
-Activities are driven by incoming calls and requests
-Scheduled activities are deferred
-Work days are extended
-Lunch hours are missed
-Important activities that just happen to not be urgent are cancelled to make room for urgent requests
If you don’t like living like this (and who does?), you need to develop Crisis Time Management Skills. Crisis Time Management is knowing how to respond appropriately to “urgent” interruptions of your planned schedule so that your priorities and actions remain focused on achieving your most important goals.
Follow these five important steps to help you implement an effective, efficient Crisis Time Management Plan:
1. Plan your schedule using SMART goals. You may set goals, but that doesn’t mean that they are the best goals or that they are laid out in the best ways. In order to make the best use of your time, your goals should always be:
Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Realistic
Time-specific
2. Set deadlines for yourself, and use these deadlines to protect your schedule from last minute “urgent” requests.
3. Avoid killer assumptions. Always ask for a clear deadline whenever you receive an assignment, and ask for guidance regarding the deliverables, so you can frame the assignment against the available time you have to get the job done.
4. Don’t let yourself be pulled into someone else’s crisis management issues. Don’t forget: a failure to plan on their part doesn’t constitute an emergency on your part.
5. Ruthlessly eliminate these time wasting habits from your life;
-Focusing on Activities unrelated to top priorities
-Saying Yes when you should say No
-Procrastination
-Filling your schedule too full every day
-Spending too much time on email, IM, texting and unscheduled phone calls
-Self-imposed interruptions (this can be anything from surfing the web to breaks that are too long to time-wasting chats with co-workers; anything that isn’t directly focused on getting your high value goals accomplished.
Remember, your time will continue to be interrupted as long as you allow yourself to be interrupted. It is up to you to respect and protect your time. If you don’t, no one else will, either.
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Time Management Quick Tip – Learn How to Use the Four Ds
When an unexpected task pops up during the day:
Dump it if it isn’t important and doesn’t have anything to do with helping you accomplish your most important goals.
Do it, if it is important and it is related to one of your most important goals.
Delegate it, if it is important or if it is related to one of your goals, but it doesn’t have to be done by you.
Defer it, if it is important or if it is related to one of your goals, but it isn’t urgent to get it done immediately.
