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Tip Of The
Week
March
1st- 7th 2009
Batch Your
Interruptions
an excerpt from The
Power Time
System (PTS)
Anything that makes you
stop doing any of your A Priorities should
be considered an interruption. Your goal
during any working day is to get as many A
Priorities done as possible; the activities
that stop you from doing A Priorities must
be controlled and tightly regulated to do as
little damage to your productivity as
possible.
I'll list 5 tasks that are
part of your day and show you how you can
limit there impact on your productivity for
the day.
1. Checking
e-mails
Limit this
addictive disruptive habit to 3 snorts a day,
notice the subtle sly
reference
to a drug habit, for those new to this page,
one of my favorite targets
for time
waster of the year is e-mails,
see
article E-mail is
Evil
2. Returning phone
calls
Yes, your phone,
cell and land line MUST at times be turned
off
3. Receiving phone
calls
Yes, your phone,
cell and land line MUST at times be turned
off
4. Reviewing and receiving
real mail, paper
5. Written responses to
co-workers, pre set responses to outside
correspondents
These are just 5
interruptions that can help destroy a day’s
productivity and results. Instead of
allowing these 5 activities to stop and
restart your day up to 10 times or more,
lets batch this group of interruptions in
one time allocation time block, allowing 10
to 20 minutes for activity, for a total time
block of 1 hour 15
minutes.
You will be able to
accomplish all 5 activities within one time
block and reduce the times you have to stop
and restart by a factor of 8 or more, a huge
savings to you in time and a major reduction
in stress. Another advantage to putting
these 5 tasks in the same time block, you
can now “play " with the time allotment,
using unused time from a task that took less
time to complete and ad that time to a task
that took longer to finish than originally
thought.
To gain the most
from this technique, try the
following:
* Always start this
time block on the hour, use it as
the " start " to a
fairly fast paced time block, I always try
to beat my record, get as much done as I can
in the shortest time frame as possible.
Believe it or not, you can actually turn
these time wasters into fun
activities
* Be fanatically strict
about ending this time block on time. If you
allow these time wasters to win, take more
time to do than you had allotted, they win
and you lose.
* Practice makes perfect.
Keep the same grouping of activities
together in the same time block; you will
get better at getting more done in less time
if you keep them together.
* Do as many “mini tasks
“as you can during this time
block.
* Schedule this time block
into a time frame where you are more likely
to be interrupted, its easier to keep
working through these kinds of items,
housekeeping items, than higher Priority
tasks.
* Be sure to stay at this
routines for at least 10 tries, 10 working
days to give yourself and this technique a
fair trial.
We teach this in our
seminars and its of course in the Power Time
System. The feed back from the participants
in the seminars and from the users of the
Power Time System is unusually
high.
Be sure to give this one a
shot.
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