Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Be Strategic About Your Time - Rita McGrath - HarvardBusiness.org

Be Strategic About Your Time - Rita McGrath - HarvardBusiness.org: "So what can you do to get more value-added productivity into your days? A few suggestions:

Develop a set of screens or scorecards that can help you systematically winnow the attractive opportunities from the less attractive. I've got one that I use for considering new clients, and it helps to set priorities clearly.

• Try to bring old projects to some kind of closure before new ones get on the list.
• Make sure to book some time with yourself for those strategic, but non-urgent tasks (like thinking, or writing) that tend to get crowded out by urgent demands. I have one client who has a mythical person named 'Joe' - meetings with Joe are for thinking, and it's understood that they are not to be interrupted.
• Check email only twice a day (promise- it won't kill you!)
• Try to make the consequences of your tradeoffs clear to those (like a boss or colleague) who may be creating excess work for you.
• Match your strategic priorities with how you spend your time - and question activities that don't drive those priorities.
• And finally, do question the value of every activity - if it simply didn't get done, what would happen?"

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