Effective ways of working – are you working effectively? “I don’t have time to go to the gym” (and I struggle with keeping up a healthy lifestyle)
“I work 100 hours a week and my personal life is taking a hit as a result” (and I struggle with enjoying my life due to high work demands)
“I don’t have time to cook so I eat out and/or make poor diet choices” …Do you see a consistent theme here? I’ll give you a hint: it’s your most valuable resource, that you don’t even realize you’re wasting. Every. Single. Day.
Do you have effective ways of working? If any of the above describes you, this is for you:
1) Adopt the NRN mentality (NRN: “no response needed”). “Inbox 0” is impossible, and there shouldn’t be any expectation around this. Get onboard with knowing that not every communication is deserving of a response.
2) Boundaries. This is a big one, guys. 3-4 hours of sleep per night? Where are your priorities? Communicate your personal and professional boundaries and where you stand with this.
3) Prioritize – this includes you, and the highest most prioritized items that matter – today. Not for eternity. What matters, the most, today? What are those 5 things?
4) Reduce the noise. Most of why people are “busy” is because they simply can’t prioritize or get things done effectively. You claim you’re busy, yet I see your contributions on Instagram, Facebook, and other non-value-added tasks (and then you claim you couldn’t “get anywhere with your job search”?) I don’t buy it.
5) Work Effectively. So many people complain about “working 15 hours a day”. Did you really need to do that? Re-evaluate why you’re spending 8 hours a day in meetings and consider why so much of your time is wasted. I guarantee a lot of that has to do with ineffective ways of working. (Specifically consider cross-collaboration, team visibility, autonomous execution, healthy teams, leveraging relevant technical tools, to name a few).
A lot of corporations fail at working effectively as a whole. You as an individual don’t need to lower yourself to these ineffective standards.
Eight Critical Prioritization Tips When Everything Seems Important