Part Two
In last week’s column, we answered the letter of Nina C., who, like many of us, seems to be overwhelmed with having to cope with deadlines, meetings and assignments. Not to mention the personal stuff she has to constantly deal with.
Rather than get swamped with these, she asked how she could be more productive.
We got a lot of help from Geoffrey James, who has a theory: “The Average Worker Spends 51 Percent of Each Workday on These 3 Unnecessary Tasks,” which he discusses in an article in inc.com.
He believes that “the reason most people are stressed for time is that they are wasting more than half of each day working on time-wasting tasks.” And he lists three culprits and simple solutions “to recapture the time that you’re, otherwise, destined to waste.” These include:
• Unnecessary commuting (13 percent)
• Unnecessary meetings (16 percent)
• Unnecessary e-mails (23 percent)
In this week’s column, we go further in the pursuit of productivity, which has been called the key to progress. According to Workplace Research as compiled in inc.com, “Productivity is a prized attitude among business professionals because time is money, money is time and everyone wants to get home after a long weekend without compromising their work.”
However, as Scott Mautz points out in “4 Ways to Eliminate Pointless Tasks from Your Daily Work,” another article in inc.com, there comes a time when “you suddenly realize you’ve drifted into spending your time at work on much too much stuff that doesn’t matter and far too little that does. You’re caught in a work plan that isn’t how you planned to work at all.”
And then we realize “other people’s agendas take hold, urgent shoves important aside, you’re forced to work with arcane work processes, and the fact that it’s just easier to say ‘yes’ than ‘no’ adds a mountain of meaningless activity.”
Can you relate to that? Mautz, who has helped many over a 30-year career “get off the low value treadmill,” suggests four steps to replace pointless work with poignant work.
Color-code your work plan
Mautz recommends that we mentally categorize our work into three colored buckets—red, green and gold. Red is work that simply must go, bothersome, but simply must go.
Green, “is your core work, how you add maximum daily value, the heart of your job. You know it when you see it here, as well, and it shouldn’t be weighed down with distracting inducing work.”
Gold “is the work that will help build your legacy in your job, the most important projects that will leave the biggest long-term impact.” If you don’t have legacy-worthy projects, you can look at projects that you would be proud to tell others you lead.
Delete, delegate or deprioritize—in that order
Mautz observes that “people start by deprioritizing elements of their work plan, feeling good about shifting the work to the bottom of the pile. But there it still sits, staring at you from the bottom of your to-do list.”
He suggests to start “by brutally deleting that ‘red work’ you identified in step one.” Then, when work has to be done, but not by you, delegate.
Mautz has some words of wisdom on delegating. “When you decide to delegate,” he says, “invest the time to give the recipient proper direction, training, and resources required to do the job right. Otherwise, it’s not delegating, it’s dumping.”
Now, “you can finally deprioritize that marginally valuable work that remains as long as you’re honest with yourself that it does really need to be done, but not immediately.”
Illuminate the cost of doing the low-value work.
Communication is essential when you’ve identified and decided on the work you’re going to delete. This involves “aligning with the stakeholders of that work that you won’t be doing it anymore,” and may we add, explaining this to them.
Mautz gives an example of being tasked to write a weekly summary report to send out to the team at the request of your boss, but discovering that no one reads the report as they prefer to get updates informally. Useless work.
At this point, Mautz says it is best to go to your boss and explain why the work is wasted time. Also, include what high-value work you will be doing instead.
When you involve stakeholders, there are more chances low-value work will be eliminated.
Give a different ‘yes’ to low-value requests.
Mautz urges us to stay mindful of the quantity and quality of the work we take on. He suggests adopting a one in, one out policy—for every new work you take on, one piece of lower value work should go (presuming you’re at full capacity).
If you struggle to say no, you can give the requestor of the low-value work a different “yes.” For example, you can suggest a different way of achieving one’s goal that won’t require this work.
All in all, Mautz believes “it takes a ‘little work’ to give the little work away. But don’t hesitate. Clean house.”
PR Matters is a roundtable column by members of the local chapter of the United Kingdom-based International Public Relations Association (Ipra), the world’s premier association for senior professionals around the world. Millie F. Dizon, the senior vice president for marketing and communications of SM, is the former local chairman.
We are devoting a special column each month to answer the reader’s questions about public relations. Please send your comments and questions to askipraphil@gmail.com.
Image credits: Baramee Thaweesombat | Dreamstime.com