Take control of your day

Our life is like a circus. You can be the ringmaster or you can be the beast. You can manage your day or let your day manage you.

It is basically a matter of discipline.

To take control of your day, you probably have to:

• Change your thought process. You have more control than you think, but you must take action and negotiate your way through the day.
• Be more patient. You need to slow down, instead of running around like a chicken with its head cut off.
• Acquire more discipline. Realize that “There is a time and a place for everything.” Without discipline, you will jump from task to task and wonder at the end of the day, “Where did today go?”

Take these examples of how you can take control of your day:

Train others to be more efficient in making their requests: Even if you have excellent time management skills, your co workers will still make your life difficult because of their poor time management skills. Whether they call, drop by your office, or send emails, they should provide enough specific information to allow you to help most efficiently. Also realize that you are part of the problem. Be more specific in how you communicate with others. Remember: lead by example.

Train others to manage their time, too: Apply the strategies (examples will be given along in my future postings). Remember: when you manage your time better, you are showing those around you how to manage their time better too. It is in your best interests to train the people around you to recognize that there is a time and a place for everything – and it is not necessarily “right here and right now”. It is nice to keep your door open, but it’s smart to control interruptions. Work at deferring the matters with which others interrupt you and scheduling a time and a place for them.

Complete more tasks instead of jumping around: When you get a request, try to fit it in where it works best for you and still works for the requestor, Multitasking may be a necessity, but it is not generally a virtue. In fact, it is often an inefficient way to allow “time” to manage you.

Do one thing at a time, like successful people do: Be a traffic cop. Just as a typical traffic cop stands in an intersection and indicates which vehicles should go and which one should stop, direct the flow of work that comes through your office and across your desk.

Stay tuned for part 4.

Don't bother the posts below, but if you are free, why not?

1. Do not sweat the details: specify and negotiate
2. Getting organized at work
3. Multitask: but focus
4. Manage your master list (ML)
5. Do not procrastinating