My coworker guest stops in our Leadership Development Program today to go through a mini workshop I’ve heard a few times before: prioritization and time management.
There is one thing that always resonates from the workshop . . . the simple lesson that I keep needing to relearn . . . is to “touch it once”. He shared one stat that if you spend just 15 minutes a day coming back to a task, rereading an email or slack, you waste over 90 hours a year. The email I read and then mark unread to deal with later. Where I then have to reread but then maybe still don’t act and on and on. The reminders I set for Slack messages because I don’t have the energy to deal with them at the moment. It’s easy to start bouncing around in your workday with an unending to-do list.
The “touch it once” rule is that you take action — if it takes less than two minutes, do it then. If it doesn’t, take some action to move it somewhere for you to take action when you have time (moving it to an email folder or blocking the task on your calendar or writing it on the to-do list). But so often I could just take the two minutes to respond to an email rather than marking as unread.
I need this reminder every six months or so to get myself back on track as I slip into bad habits. Deal with things right away rather than letting them fester and take up space in my brain I don’t have to spare. I’ll keep practicing.
With Love,
Natalie