One Cool Tool To Structure Your Work

Many of my clients complain that they have such a big workload and that there’s always more to do than what they have time for. They ask themselves: “How on earth will I get through the day?”

They say: “I’m not taking on anything else. Isn’t anybody else working in this place?”

They ask: “Where shall I start?”

And that’s the critical question. Where shall I start?

They live through their days by doing the things that come in front of their eyes first, and they do it because it’s easier to get rid of it and move on to the next thing. They then complete that item of work and get rid of it and think “hey this is easy, I’m getting somewhere!”. But then someone comes and demands that they should do something else and all of a sudden they are in somebody else’s control again and get sidetracked. They are working in crisis mode, fighting fires as they pop up during the day and never working to an efficient proactive routine of work.

This is how it goes on day after day, and they get more behind with their work. They have to start doing the important things in the evenings at home, after the kids have gone to bed. This is definitely not the way they thought they would work, but that’s the only time they can work undisturbed.

But does it have to be like this? Most of my client’s dream of having the possibility of doing all their work in the daytime at their workplace.

Meet my client Elisa, she had it just like I described above. She’s only thirty five but is a very skilled leader and she has a work group of nineteen people underneath her. She says it’s a little bit too much and at home she has a hubby and twins of ten years old.

So what can she do? We used just one simple but very effective tool to settle her situation. This tool is, in its simplicity, almost genius.

It’s so easy to use and it doesn’t really demand any stuff that you need to have such as material or special tools or anything. All you need is a piece of paper and a pen.

This is not a original Dr Annika invention but something that I have seen in so many leadership programs, and since it’s so simple and it really takes the stress away I find it very good for my stress at work.

It’s perfect for the all the overwhelmed people out there. So what is it?

Well firstly it has three steps:

Step One

First thing in the morning, or you can do it in the in the evening before, you write down a list of everything you need to do that day. Big or small just put it down as it comes out of your head, this is called a brain dump. Nice and easy.

Step Two

Secondly, and now the work begins, you go through your tasks and you will see if they are important or not. You decide if they are urgent or not and place them into four boxes.

The first box: is important and urgent.

The second box: is important but not so urgent.

The third box: is not important but urgent

The fourth one: is not important and not so urgent.

To make it easy you can set this up as a template with those headlines above written down so you know which one is one, two, three and four and you just put the number after the tasks.

Now you have a list and you have a number on each thing on the list to indicate where they fit in with urgency and importance.

Step 3

In the third step you structure your items into these groups of one, two, three or four.

And then you look at group four; the not important and not urgent stuff. With this group you delegate it or you can even delete it because it might not even need to be done if it’s not important and not urgent. It could be things that people just do because we always have done them but no one has really reflected on them and decided are they really needed.

Next up is group number three which is; urgent but not so important. This group of tasks could also be delegated or deleted, again maybe there are things that don’t need to be done?

So now you’re set for your work because now you’re taking away all the stuff that you don’t need to do. Now we look at the rest of the list and we start with number one, and those were the urgent and important tasks.

These tasks will be tasks that bring your business group forward, and when you’ve done those you can do the ones in the number two group; the ones that are important but not so urgent. This is the group of tasks where usually it’s a little bit more difficult.

Things end up here because they are not urgent but are still important, however they don’t get done because they are not classed as urgent, but they are needed to move your business or your work group forward. So they are very important and so you just have to start doing them otherwise your work group will stagnate in it’s progress.

Of course you will get interrupted during the days, that happens in every workplace and there isn’t a lot you can do to stop it. But when you work with this way of looking at the tasks then you can more easily say if it’s a task that you’re going to take, if you’re going to say no or if you’re going to give it to somebody else. And then you keep working during the day and the next day you do the same thing and the next day you do the same thing, you create a positive habit of making your list and choosing your priorities the right way.

And then you delegate or you delete and after a while there will not be so many things in the delete or the delegate box. Because if you don’t focus on them they’re all kind of going to vanish by themselves.

It took Elisa just about four weeks to make this an automatic way of thinking and she did this every morning. Her work group also learned this method so all together they became a much more efficient team, they didn’t do a lot of unnecessary work like they had done before and she stopped working from home at least for this reason.

So a recap of what Elisa did:

Number One: brain dump each morning everything that needs to be done.

Number Two: you sort it into important or not and urgent or not, and that gives the four categories that we talked about.

Number Three: sort through the items in box number three and four and either delete or delegate them. Then you start working with the ones in the group one that are important and necessary and then the number two that are important but not so urgent but it really has to be done to move you forward.

Keep this up every day and it gets easier and easier and easier! Happy working.

If you like this and want more free tips than just click this link and if you know someone who would benefit from this information feel free to share the link.

To your success and keep smiling!