Insecurity Work
Insecurity work is our dip-checks, drills and monitoring the health of our business, making sure everything is normal.
Insecurity work can be compartmentalized into chosen time periods every day, maybe just 30 minutes at the end of each day.
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Reactionary work is the stuff that we do out of a reaction, like picking a phone because it is ringing. Checking email, replying to a text message, is all reactionary work. It is a necessary evil.
Reactionary work can be distracting and take up most of our time. Blocking time for certain activities like responding to email or replying to text messages may help.
Planning work is time spent on listing, prioritizing and scheduling your work.
Planning helps us become efficient in our execution. Thus, allocating special time for planning work is crucial. Proactive planning can be exceptionally productive and beneficial in the long run.
It is the stuff we have to do, like writing a check to pay our bills, preparing our tax returns, or even making a daily report.
Procedural work is best tackled by technology: automation minimizes the time spent and errors generated in any procedural work.
Our creativity is in its full potential in problem-solving work. This requires our brainpower, focus, and attention.
Problem-solving work is only possible in a distraction-free zone, away from the ringing phones and notifications.
If the problem you're working on is of genuine interest, then there is real engagement and exceptional results will follow.
Reactionary work can be distracting and take up most of our time. Blocking time for certain activities like responding to email or replying to text messages may help.
Remember that reactionary work seems urgent but is not important at that moment.
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Once a strategic plan is set, resources must be aligned to focus on that contribution. Great strategic executives know how to use data to generate new insights about how they and their industries make money. Examining patterns of performance over time — financial, operational, customer, and competitive data — will reveal critical foresight about future opportunities and risks and allow proper resource management.
All your emails fit into one of the following 6 categories:
- Respond today: reply immediately if urgent, at the end of the workday if important
- Respond later: schedule time in the calendar in the future to reply
- Optional response: no need to respond, but it would be nice of you to
- Not important and no need to reply: archive or delete
- Read later: file into a specific folder and read in your spare time (e.g. newsletters and reports)
- Filling: file into a specific folder (e.g. purchase receipts, copies of important documents, travel arrangements).
After you accomplish anything professionally, get online and write about it. Help someone who was once in your shoes trying to figure things out.
The bigger the audience you have, the more people will take you seriously.