HTR results - My time last week: work

Last week, I implemented several changes to the way I manage my time. The bottom line is that it turned out to be like no other week that I have ever experienced. It represented the culmination of my current state of HAVE TO reduction research, so there were changes in almost every aspect of my day to day life. Obviously, too much for one post! So, over the next few days, I'll post about each component with a note about where I found the philosophy that informed the change - and what I used from that. Ya'll know how I am - I take inputs from anywhere, but I'll modify those inputs until I'm happy with them!

So, today we talk about my job.

As you know, I have been reading The 4-Hour Workweek. In my opinion, this book will only work well for 2 groups of people: those in a very similar position to Tim Ferriss and those, like me, who take the philosophy behind his program and tweak it to the point that he may not even recognize the implementation. (He doesn't strike me as easily offended, so I don't think that will bother him much.)

I liked the idea of ruthlessly paring down time and energy spent on silly things. To do that, I also had to spend some time - as he recommended - working through ideas on what I would like to be doing with my time. This provided the motivation that I needed to complete my work- leaving nothing hanging over my head to worry about later - as efficiently as possible. I should point out that I would not have done this if I were still in the office everyday. There is no incentive for me to free up work time if all I can do is sit at my desk for that last hour or so a day, but it is a great motivator if I can go clean my house!

It was also really important for me to recognize that work my behavior patterns were not particularly productive. Somewhere along the line, I decided that everyone was my customer. This is, obviously, not true. I realized that while taking a look at how I spent my work days.

So, what did these ideas actually get me to do?

• As I mentioned last week, I dropped off of the internal IM and started checking my e-mail about once an hour instead of once every 10 minutes. Needless to say, this saved me a ridiculous amount of wasted time.
• I saved all bulk distribution e-mails to be read at one time at the end of the day. After doing this for a week, I've determined that there are 2 that show up every day that I do not need to read.
  
• I resent agendas for each of the weekly consulting meetings that I hold with project leads. Two meetings went from 1 hour to 30 minutes or less. One meeting went from 30 minutes to 15.
  
• I spent an hour (saved above!) coaching one project lead to establish an agenda for his weekly team call and I asked him to let me know when he wanted me to attend. This dropped a weekly 1 hour "working level" meeting from my calendar entirely until the team works through all of the things that we have already discussed.
• I got rid of 5 nagging "I need to get around to this" tasks from my work list
• I spent 2.5 hours working through an activity analysis requested by another project team. This was, in my mind, a silly HAVE TO, but it is part of a very high visibility project that is run by a "checklist" style project manager. I met her deadline, but I was probably still within 10 days of nasty e-mails to me with a cc: to my boss.
• I actually had time - on my one day in the office - to get my face seen by everyone that should see me. This is a first since I started working from home.
• I finished every day without feeling stressed or exhausted and I completed everything on my list.

Although all of these are nice, the most important one for me was really that last one. By focusing on the work that matters to my actual customers, and ruthlessly getting rid of everything else, I know what my work day should include. When I have finished those tasks - including some silly HAVE TOs - I am done. Although this was true before, I was managing my time so ineffectively that I left tasks on my list each day. This led to a constant, nagging tug that uncompleted tasks seem to exert on me. Now, I'm finished with each work day at the end of each work day. Since I work from home most days, there is no benefit in trying to look busy forthe rest of that time, so I can move on to taking care of other areas of my life. And you aren't going to believe what I got done with that - but that is a post for another day!