Do you start the day opening your email and looking at the hundreds or thousands of messages in your Inbox? How does that make you feel? Overwhelmed, stressed and feeling like you are always behind on your commitments?
Do you have days where you know you worked very hard but somehow have nothing to show what you accomplished? How does that make you feel? Unproductive, overworked and stressed?
Do you feel that everyday you are at the beck and call of everyone else and do not have any control of what new crisis will hit you next? How does that make you feel? Dis-empowered, helpless and always wondering what the next crisis is?
These three symptoms typified my work life since I became a manager almost four years ago. I often said to my fellow managers:
“I am working really hard but it is not sustainable to do 10 and 12 hour days. I have to find a way to work smart so that my hard work really pays off!”
I attended a training course on using Outlook 2010 in May that has fundamentally changed how I approach my work. The course was offered by Priority Management Systems Inc and called Working Sm@rt with Microsoft Outlook. The course focused on using Outlook as a real productivity tool instead of using it just for email and calendaring. The instructor calls this “using Outlook with a business planning approach”.
The premise of the course is that in order to be productive, you need to focus on your commitments. To do this, you have to stop using your email Inbox as your To Do list. Face it, who puts things in your Inbox? You or other people.
As long as you start your day working in your Inbox, you will always be reactive in your efforts and working to someone else’s agenda.
To change this approach, the instructor helped us configure out Outlook client to open in our calendar and task list view. This is revolutionary for me. Previous to this, I used my Inbox, a paper based Day Timer journal, a Notepad document, a OneNote page and an Excel spreadsheet to try to keep To Do lists. None actually suited how I worked and I always found that I missed something or got distracted by conflicting priorities due to using multiple lists. Read more...
