Photo Credit: truetimetracker.com
By Shakeeb Hammad
Going into office in the morning, sipping your coffee while checking your emails, you know you have a busy day ahead. Whether meetings, interviews, site visits, phone calls, customer servicing, engine fixing, etc. everyone has their own responsibilities and tasks. In terms of “work-load”, almost all of us have plenty of that. But where we differ is in our results and outcomes i.e. the delivery. Delivering quality work differs from delivering average work. For that, some employees are STARS while the majority is average – “They work just hard enough not to get fired” as George Carlin likes to put it.
Every employee reaps what he/she planted in terms of salaries, commissions, benefits and/or bonuses. STAR employees exist in every organization because they do several things differently from what the majority does. This gives them the edge in exceeding the others in terms of paychecks, positions and success.. Among these things that they do, time management sits atop. Unfortunately most people don’t believe that “time is our most valuable asset”. They squander it and thus producing average or below-average results. But, for some, these results may not reflect their true and ambitious intentions. They may be trying and striving but all in the wrong means; success and failure are measured by the quality of work not by the quantity of it. So for these people I say, better than working harder, work SMARTER. Start by managing your time. Having a to-do list would be excellent but I think it’s a bit early. Why not try a “stop-doing list” first!
While reading Jim Collins’ “Good to Great”, I came across this interesting yet simple idea:
“Most of us lead busy but undisciplined lives. We have ever-expanding ‘to do’ lists, trying to build momentum by doing, doing, doing—and doing more. And it rarely works. Those who built the good-to-great companies, however, made as much use of ‘stop doing’ lists as ‘to do’ lists.”
To-do lists can go on and on especially for people who are exceptional time-wasters and are trying to change. Changing one’s habit, you know, isn’t an overnight process. It takes practice, persistence and a whole lot of patience and commitment to succeed. Most people will start by jotting down their tasks for the day. They will stuff too many chores that are not reasonable even for the very disciplined of employees. At the end of the day, there are two possible outcomes: either the crosses on the to-do list are so few that finishing them would take more than 24 hours-a-day or all the chores are done but with minimum concentration and effort on each which leads to a bigger problem than the initial one.
On the other hand, stop-doing lists are much more effective. Reflecting on a normal routine day, we see that many hours are spent on doing time-wasting and distracting activities. Checking emails, for instance, every 20 minutes leads to a divided attention on the task being executed thus a disappointing result. Whereas, turning off the email notifer and managing our email-checking to 3 , 4 times-a-day would necessarily bring a much more satisfactory outcome in any given task. The same goes to all these Pings, Beeps and notification alerts that never stop reminding us of their existence.
So starting with incremental steps of stop-doing what we are used to do leads to doing what we are supposed to do. By gradually stopping some of our daily “fail” routines and habits we are steadily accomplishing more of our stocked work and delivering better results.
Every one of us knows how they spend their time at work, so going into detailed examples of what should be stopped is pointless. Once we grasp the idea that we are judged and paid in terms of the quality of work we produce, we can start committing to bettering ourselves. Stop-doing lists which may alter our habits and get us out of our comfort zones will definitely bring in those bucks we crave for and in consequence lead us to respect our time at work.
So start working a little smarter, commit to stop doing what wastes your precious time and knock yourself out with the goods of your results!
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