8 Strategies for eliminating time wasters

When working on your time management, you may focus on the big tasks which are taking more time than they should. This usually helps you to make a big difference quickly but if you want to be truly effective, you need to keep on top of the little time wasters which steal your time. If you do not learn to manage these time wasters effectively, they will soon eat up the time saved from focusing on the bigger tasks. Eliminating the big time wasters usually focuses on how we manage ourselves but eliminating the smaller time wasters usually focuses on streamlining how we interact with others. Eliminating these small time wasters requires processes and techniques which take some time to implement and perfect. Once you have perfected them, the time savings can be immense. Most of the small time wasters revolve around communication. This is unsurprising when you consider that the manner in which most people like to communicate is the polar opposite of the most effective ways to communicate. In general, we are social beings who like to talk to people in person and get to know them but for most interactions, this is highly ineffective. The majority of interactions are not that important and can easily be resolved within 30-60 seconds. However, if you deal with most communication in person or by phone, you quickly break into general conversation and the discussion can easily last 5 minutes or more. Multiply this by the number of interactions you have in a week and you will find that effective communication can really save a great deal of time.

Eliminating time wasters

The following strategies will help you to eliminate many of the more common time wasters which arise due to ineffective communication.

1. Inform in advance

Many of the queries you receive on a regular basis are looking for the same information over and over again. If this information is already available to people e.g. F.A.Q’s on your website or intranet, it can greatly reduce the number of queries you receive. One of the projects I am currently working on is to add an F.A.Q. page and a price list for my standard services to my website. I estimate that this will reduce speculative queries by about 40%.

 2. Turn off audible alerts on email

If you get an alert every time somebody sends you an email, your first instinct is to check the email. This is allowing others to control your time. You should only check, and respond to, your email when it is convenient for you to do so.

 3. Check your email at predetermined times

Select the best times for you to check your email and check it as few times as will work effectively for your business. As I offer email support to my clients, I find that it is best to check my email 3 times each day. The times which work best for me are 10 A.M.  4 P.M. and I do a late evening check at approximately 8 P.M. Due to the nature of my work, the times may vary a little from time to time but the principle stays the same.

 4. Never check your email first thing in the morning

If you check your email first thing, you can easily become distracted from your priorities. You start responding to every email and before you know it, you have wasted a few hours of your day without completing anything important. Instead, identify your most important task for each day and schedule it for first thing in the morning. Get it done before you open your email. That way, even if all manner of emergencies occur when you open your email, you have already completed your most important task and therefore have had an effective day.

 5. Email, Phone, In-person

As most discussions are not really important, you should not be having these discussions in person. When you have a discussion in-person, you are giving others the opportunity to distract you and waste your time. Any discussions which can be dealt with without debate should be re-directed towards email. This allows you to control when you answer the query and how much time to give to it. Where email will not suffice, use the phone. Save in-person discussions as a last resort.

 6. You do not have to respond via the same medium

Just because somebody submitted a query via the phone, or left you a voicemail, it does not mean that you have to respond via the phone. If you can respond via email, do so. It will avoid distraction or unnecessary conversation. Also, you won’t be placed on hold and you won’t have to ring the person more than once to get hold of them.

 7. No agenda; no meeting

Do not agree to meetings which do not have a clear agenda. Meetings which have a clear agenda, and a strong chairperson, can be swift and highly productive. They are clear on the topics for discussion and have allocated times for each item along with strict start and finish times.

 If there is no clear agenda, there is little chance of it finishing quickly as most of the time will be spent bouncing from topic to topic with very little being decided or agreed. Poorly defined meetings are one the most serious time wasters in business. If other people want to waste their time like this, let them, but don’t let them waste your time too.

To do this, you will need to adopt a more assertive approach. To learn assertiveness techniques and more communication strategies, check out How To Talk So Others Will Listen.

 8. Protect your workspace

One of the big mistakes I made in my first job was to allow people to drop over to my desk as and when they felt like it. Whenever they had an issue, I would look up and they would be standing over my desk. Conversations tended to take 10 xs longer than they should and I could not even begin to add up how much time was wasted. Your workspace must remain a highly productive space. If people feel that they can regularly interrupt you, they will. They don’t mean any harm but they do quite a lot of harm to your schedule.

If people do drop by your desk, you can try one of the following:

• Inform them that you are busy and ask them to put their query in an email.
• Inform then that you are busy but you can give them 2 minutes to deal with it now. If you do this, you must stick to the 2 minutes.
• If it is important, inform that you are busy and agree a time to discuss via the phone.

You can learn effective strategies to eliminate distractions and overcome procrastination with Stop Procrastinating. Most of the little time wasters, which steal so much of your time, revolve around how you interact with others. When you adopt more effective processes for your time management, you cannot just train yourself to use your time more effectively. You must also, through your behaviour, train others to conform to your new practices. At first, some people may feel a little put out by your new practices but they are usually the biggest time wasters. Remind them that you are improving your effectiveness so that you may serve them better. When you remove these little time wasters from your life, you are genuinely better able to serve people while meeting your needs and objectives. When others experience the improved service, they will have a new found respect for both you and your time. Identify the time wasters which have the greatest impact on your life and implement one of the strategies, above, to eliminate it from your life. Image credit: Chance Agrella