Not Prioritizing

Written communication channels don't allow you to soften difficult messages with nonverbal cues.

Delivering a message in person makes it easier to pick up on signs that people have misunderstood parts of your message.

It's tempting to try to avoid difficult conversations, but this can cause further problems.

• Preparation is key to handling difficult conversations.
• Use tools such as the Situation – Behavior – Impact technique to encourage your people to reflect on their behavior.
• Role-play your conversation first.

The way to improve your Time Management skills requires us to figure out where to focus. This can be done by:

• Getting an objective self-assessment done by your peers or boss, or establishing a baseline behavior to measure your performance against.
• Understanding that it is your skills, not your personality or preferences that can be developed to provide the best results.
• Identifying the key skill(s) that you need to prioritize, and avoiding spreading yourself too thin.

The key factor to consider when developing awareness skills is that effectiveness (doing things well) is as important as efficiency (doing things fast).

• Find which time of the day is your 'peak performance time.
• Treat time as money, a limited resource, and create a 'time budget' for your to-do list.
• Measure and evaluate the projected time vs the actual time taken.
• Consider which of the tasks create follow-up tasks that take up your time later.
• Take into consideration the 'opportunity cost' of spending time in an activity.

There's only so much that you can achieve working on your own, that's why it's important to delegate effectively. To successfully delegate:

• Explain what your team's role and goals are. Or even formalize it in a team charter, which can also be useful for keeping the team on track.
• Think about the skills, experience and competencies within your team, and start matching people to tasks. 

Whatever approach you prefer to adopt, you also need to bear in mind that different people have different needs when it comes to motivation. 

One size does not fit all. Some individuals are highly self-motivated, while others will under-perform without managerial input, and you need to be able to handle both. 

Your “frog” is your most important task, the one you are most likely to procrastinate on if you don’t do something about it.

If you have two important tasks, start your day with the biggest, hardest, and most important task first. Focus on completing it before you go to the next one.

We tend to confuse activity with accomplishment: we attend endless meetings and make plans, but at the end of the day, no one does the job and gets the results required.

“Failure to execute” is among the biggest problems in organizations today.

During this allotted break, give yourself permission to do time-wasting activities (social media scrolling included) until you got bored and want to move on to your next task. 

And if your job isn’t ideal for focusing on one thing per day, you can dedicate your morning to one focus area, your early afternoon to another, and late afternoon to another.

This way, instead of being overly restrictive about finishing a task in that time period, you have the flexibility to do any work that moves you forward in that particular focus area.

Instead of increasing the number of productive hours, we can focus on getting the right things done in a timely way. We also need to restore and balance ourselves, our colleagues, family and environment, instead of a neurotic or pathological focus on deadlines.

Find out what's truly important to us and use the finite resource of time wisely.

Phantom workload looks like real work but results in massive unproductivity and even conflict in an organization. The pressure to meet unrealistic expectations causes a vicious cycle of further workload.

Leaders need to take a hard look at what is being avoided or not addressed. Facing difficult tasks that were 'swept under the carpet' earlier strengthens them further to make hard decisions and face difficult people and situations.

Switching between tasks can have damaging costs to our work and productivity.

Develop the habit of single-tasking by forcing your brain to concentrate on one task and one task only. Put your phone away, close all the browser windows and apps that you don’t need. Immerse yourself in this task. Only move to the next one when you’re done.

“Time management is not a peripheral activity or skill. It is the core skill upon which everything else in life depends.”