What is one simple thing you can do each day at the office to help you sleep better at night?

Before you leave the office, spend 5-10 minutes to “O&P” (organize & prioritize)!

At the end of the day, it’s usually a little quieter and allows you a few minutes to spend time on O&P.  If not (read:  if you have an office where leaving at 5pm is considered EARLY, and there are usually people in the office from 7am – 10pm taking a tour through work-a-holism), shut your door and turn off your phone for 5-10 minutes.  It’s all you need … especially if you don’t get interrupted.

3-5 minutes:  Assess all of the information you received today (e.g., email requests, voice mails, and hard-copy requests placed in your inbox or mailbox).  Add to your to do list if you must (highlight those that are truly a priority … meaning you want to schedule them within the next week versus you want to do them ’someday’ when you have time), but make sure you “D or D” (delegate or delete) anything you can.  If you do this everyday, you will have an extensive, ongoing list (but you won’t forget anything!)

2 – 5 minutes:  Review your calendar for the next day, and make note of what time you have available (i.e., outside of meetings or other time-bound activities).  Taking “free time” and “task priorities” into consideration, make a SHORT list for the following day of the items you want to address on your list that day.  Put as FEW items as possible … this will help you avoid feeling overwhelmed in your one hour of “free time” between a staff meeting and the board meeting.

That’s it!  This O&P method takes VERY LITTLE TIME, but saves you LOTS OF TIME the following day because you know exactly what you’re setting out to accomplish.  Also, since you have scheduled only tasks that you have available time for, you know you can check everything off your list that day (ahhh, the great sense of accomplishment!)  Additionally, since you have scheduled to work on the highest priority items, you can be sure that you’re taking care of the right (i.e., most visible) business while ensuring that those “some day” projects are not forgotten (they can stay on your list – un-highlighted – for a while!)

End result?  LESS STRESS.  We hope taking 5-10 minutes at the end of your day to O&P allows you to be more productive, have more job satisfaction, feel LESS STRESSED, and enhance your work-life balance!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 at 4:45 PM and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.