Daily prep in business

How do you start your day as a businessperson? I suppose most of us – especially if you are self-employed and working from a home office – are likely to simply fire up the computer and get going. Right? It may not come as a surprise to hear that this may not be the most efficient way of starting out, we all have had those days that were full of activity and didn’t really go the way we expected them to go.

But then, what did we expect in the first place? Did you have any expectations in the morning. I suspect that you didn’t, really.

If you are guilty of the jumpstart method of morning business, you are missing out on an important chance to give your day that extra push of efficiency you need to make sure that things happen: as many of them in as much of a time-efficient way as possible.

Let’s look at the day after a jumpstart: you’ll have a steaming cup of coffee or tea next to you, maybe the paper mail pile, and a computer that has properly started up and is ready to use. How do you proceed from here? Open email program and read, unless you have already done that on your phone while you made that cup of hot beverage. Well, either way, you’ll have to read all those emails again, properly consider them, reply to them and work through the lot.

Issue 1: reading emails more than once.

Issue 2: first reading all emails, then choosing one and acting on it.

Let’s assume you have finally worked through all your emails and paper mail, and properly get started with work on more substantial projects. You’ll have a ten minute window to get into that, and then the first email reply to your earlier sending spree comes in, interrupting you and taking your attention back to communication.

Issue 3: you gave someone an opportunity to interrupt you.

Issue 4: you let yourself be distracted and became reactive.

This is just a little window into daily life: we usually spend too much time in communication – more than realistically necessary – and cannot really focus on anything else.
How can you get around this? Easy: plan your day in the morning. Rather than hit the ground running you may want to spend a short moment (realistically less than 10 minutes) to sketch out what you plan to do on that day.

• Take a piece of paper and transfer your fixed appointments from your agenda: this will allow you to see clearly when you have time to fill with other, more flexible activities. Don’t forget to take travel times into account!
• Now think about communications: you know more or less how much time you need to spend on your morning routine with incoming paper mail and email. Assign a long enough block of time to go through it all in the morning. (see hints on dealing with incoming emails below)
• The remaining empty blocks during the day can be filled with two types of entries: ‘work’ blocks and ‘communication’ blocks. I would advise to disregard incoming communication outside of ‘communication’ blocks and focus on the ‘work’ at hand.
• Depending on your personal balance between ‘communication’ and ‘work’, plan blocks of length that works for you.

Hints for dealing with incoming communications:

• The best rule for dealing with email is simple: “touch every email only once”. Sounds strange, but it works: read it and decide if this is a “needs action now”, “needs action later”, “have read and can file” or a “have read and can ditch” type of email. “Needs action now”: keep in Inbox, “needs action later”: add reminder in agenda and move to appropriate folder, “file” and “ditch”: do straight away. This will leave only “needs action” and “unread” in your inbox. Now take action!
• Turning off notifications is a good idea. If you are waiting for something, you can always check, but at the very least you will not be distracted each time something comes in.
  

It’s a small thing to do every day, but I would ask you to give it a try for a week and see if it changes your productivity.