Do You Get All Your Work Done Every Day?
Summary:
This weeks question comes from lucy. Lucy asks, hi. I’m trying to get more organized, but no matter how hard i try, i can never get all my work done. Is it a problem with me or something i’m doing wrong? Can i ask if you get all your work done every day? No, no, i don’t get all mywork done every day. There’s just too much to do. But i do start the day with a list of objectives or outcomes i want from the day. And with those, i generally do get them done. On most days i will have around 20 to 25 tasks to complete. These tasks include my prioritized tasks
Transcript:
Speaker 1
don’t worry, i won’t be asking you for your email address. Just go to my down loads page, click on the areso focus work book and boom, you can get it. Ok, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
Speaker 2
This weeks question comes from lucy. Lucy asks, hi. Call i reskon. I discovered you through your blog, and i hope you can help me. I’m trying to get more organized, but no matter how hard i try, i can never get all my work done. I don’t know if it’s a problem with me or something i’m doing wrong. Can i ask if you get all your work done every day?
Speaker 1
Thank you, lucy, for your question, and i can answer it in just one word. No, no, i don’t get all my work done every day. There’s just too much to do. But i do start the day with a list of objectives or outcomes i want from the day. And with those, i generally do get them done. Let me explain. On most days i will have around 20 to 25 tasks to complete. These tasks include my prioritized tasks as well as my routines. Now, the way to start with this is to understand that while we can control what we do each day we cannot control how much time we have. Time is fixed. The only variable in the equation is your activity. Now activity can be affected by a number of things, our energy levels, whether we got enough sleep, outside events such as family emergencies, client and customer demands and our bosses. We cannot control these. Our energy levels and how much sleep we get depends on many things. You might wake up with a cold, which makes you feel dreadful. Or one of your children wakes up in the middle of the night and cannot get back to sleep. There’s just too many variables here. Yet the clock will keep ticking no matter how you feel or what emergency you come in to work and face. So we need to get strategic. And to do that, we need to ask a simple question each day. What do i want to get accomplished to day? Now imagine you’ve been on a two day training course and you have not been able to stay on top of your e mail and messages while you were away. You could begin the day with an objective to get your email and messages under control. That might take you two or three hours. But if you have decided that is one of your outcomes for the day, then you open your calendar and schedule it, block out two or three hours and call it communication time. Now let us imagine you woke up this morning with a headache, your muscles ache and you feel awful. Not a great condition to be in to get a lot of work done. So what do you do? Well, ask the question, based on how i feel to day, what do i want to get accomplished in this situation, you may only be able to catch upon your reading or clear your email messages. You can look at your list of things to do and decide to postpone some of the more difficult work till later in the week, when hopefully you feel a lot better. On a day to day basis, you want to have two or three must do tasks and begin the day knowing very clearly what completing those tasks will look (TimeĀ 0:01:49)