I am so busy

Have you ever heard a col­league, client or sup­pli­er say that they are not busy? Let’s be hon­est, hard­ly ever, right? Okay, after all we do often have quite a lot to do; your employ­er does­n’t pay you a salary for doing nothing.

Occas­sion­al­ly, I look at my job: am I doing the right things (effec­tiv­i­ty) and am I doing things right? (effi­cien­cy). There’s a lot you have to deal with. I was born in a time when mak­ing phone calls (land­line), send­ing fax­es and face-to-face meet­ings were the only means of com­mu­ni­ca­tion with your clients and col­leagues. Nowa­days, a lot of new means of com­mu­ni­ca­tion have been added: e‑mail, what­sapp, tex­ting, LinkedIn mes­sages, Skype and for those who are inter­est­ed Face­book and Twit­ter. Orig­i­nal­ly, I am pret­ty chaot­ic, so I real­ly had to teach myself a thing or two. What helped me most, was read­ing a book by David Allen, ​“Get­ting things done”. His most impor­tant tips were:

1. Emp­ty your head; make a to-do list on paper or digitally. 
2. Deter­mine your course of action on the basis of sit­u­a­tion, time avail­able, ener­gy avail­able or priority. 
3. Look very reg­u­lar­ly ahead in your cal­en­dar; what is com­ing up? Do I have enough time to exe­cute and final­ize actions? Book time slots in your cal­en­dar to get things done.

And of course, there is some­thing that David Allen could not antic­i­pate its impact on your job, when he wrote his book: the con­stant stim­uli of social media and news­sites. We are con­tin­u­ous­ly ​“trig­gered” to read/​look at/​listen to things. Sim­ply turn every­thing off when you have to con­cen­trate on work. That will help you to deal with things much faster. 

And reward­ing your­self after hav­ing tak­en care of a few actions is allowed; a cup of cof­fee, hav­ing a cook­ie (or some fruit) or tak­ing a short walk. Mere­ly think­ing about the reward improves your job satisfaction!