4 Simple Time Hacks To Improve Your Performance As A Manager

Hack # 1 - Take Control Of Your Email

It’s no secret that the convenience of email has become a curse. Because it’s so easy to fire off a message we do. The only problem with that is that everyone else does too. There is a constant background chatter of email conversations going on that cry for our attention. It doesn’t have to be that way.

The first step to email sanity is to turn your notifications off, not just on your laptop but on your phone as well. Yes that may take some courage but if you’re committed to improving your performance as a manager or leader it’s essential that you do this.

Three things are likely to happen:

1 - You may experience withdrawal symptoms. Believe it or not, we’ve become so hooked on notifications that some of us have become addicted to the dopamine hit that arises from them. The anxiety that you feel when your phone or laptop is out of reach is actually the body telling you it’s looking for it’s next hit. It may be hard at the start but once you get over this the relief and improvement in your performance will be remarkable.

2 - You may feel anxious about all the fires that might be going on that you ‘should’ be putting out. As a manager or a leader, it’s not your job to put out fires. It’s the job of your team. If they, and your clients, are constantly coming to you for direction then you don’t have an email problem, you have a leadership and a delegation problem. We’ll cover that in more detail another day but just know that the more you ‘train’ people to rely on you for the minute details, the more they will do so.

3 - You will be able to focus more on the important leadership matters that improve your performance and the performance of your team. Every time you get distracted by a notification, it takes a long time to regain focus on the task at hand. Some studies say 9 minutes some say longer. In this interview Gloria Mark, sums up the ‘cause’ of this problem.

But the bad news is, when you're interrupted, you don't immediately go back to the task you were doing before you were interrupted. There are about two intervening tasks before you go back to your original task, so it takes more effort to reorient back to the original task. Also, interruptions change the physical environment. For example, someone has asked you for information and you have opened new windows on your desktop, or people have given you papers that are now arranged on your desk. So often the physical layout of your environment has changed, and it's harder to reconstruct where you were. So there's a cognitive cost to an interruption.

So even though you think responding to an email ‘will only take a moment,’ it will actually rob you of much more than that. Over the course of an hour, just 3 interruptions (from email or elsewhere) could cost you more than an hour in lost productive time. That’s poor performance.

At the end of the day, most email conversations will flow and resolve themselves without you anyway so resist the urge to monitor every volley. The second step below will ensure that you stay well enough informed without things going beyond your control.

The second step to email sanity is to set aside specific times of the day to check your emails. Batch processing improves performance in almost any environment and email is no exception. If you set aside blocks of time at say, 10.30, 1.30 and 4.30, for example, you’ll find you can power through your emails in about a third of the time it would take you otherwise (and that doesn’t include reorientation time when you keep interrupting yourself).

Note that the first time in the example isn’t at the beginning of the work day. This is deliberate and highly advised. You are better to start your day with tasks that are important to you as a leader than to let someone else’s email (and their agenda) take you off task.

And when you do batch process your emails follow the 4D rule. Do, Defer, Delegate, Delete. Every email should have one of these actions:

Do - If the email can be actioned within 3 minutes then do it now.
Defer - If it requires more than 3 minutes, create a task on your to do list and action it later based on the priorities on your to do list.
Delegate - Who else could or should be actioning this? Delegate accordingly.
Delete - If there’s no action required, archive it and move on.

Hint - Once you’ve done the processing, there shouldn’t be any emails left in your inbox. An inbox that never shrinks is demoralising and leaves you without a sense of progress so file emails to folders that make sense to your workflow. You’d never use a letterbox as a to do list so don’t let your inbox become that either.

You might even consider follow the example of Atos Origin, a French company that set a zero email policy for internal communications for their 70,000 staff. Though they didn’t hit the target, they did reduce internal emails by 60% through using other tools proven to be more effective than email. This was a contributing factor to Atos’s operating margin increasing from 6.5% to 7.5% in 2013, earnings per share increases of more than 50%, and administrative costs reductions from 13% to 10%.

PS - There is nothing especially ‘professional’ in replying to emails ‘in a timely fashion’ (aka now). The urgency that most people apply to email response times just creates a self fulfilling loop that ultimately dampens performance for all concerned.

Hack # 2 - Clear Your Desk

There is nothing like a clear desk. Some folks say they find clutter reassuring because then they know where they can find things. The trouble with this thinking is that you’re faced with constant reminders and remnants of unfinished work.

The apparent ease of being able to find what you need is offset by a low level of unease about what still remains to be done. And behind that there is likely to be a lack of trust in yourself to put a system in place to make sure that things are not forgotten.

Environment matters no matter who you are or what you think your preference might be. All it takes is 5 minutes, maybe two or three times a day to clear things away and find a rightful home or resting place for them. Use this time to mentally reset yourself and set your intention for the next batch of tasks at hand. Each time you do it you’ll have a sense of satisfaction and completion that sets you up nicely another round of action. This will improve your performance, guaranteed.

Hack # 3 - Meet On Your Feet

Meetings are notorious for being long, wasteful and unproductive. Once everyone is sitting around the table, the level of engagement drops for some while others go off in their own heads (or smartphones) to fulfill their own agenda.

A stand up meeting however has a totally different level of feel and engagement. People expect stand up meetings to end quicker. Indeed they do end quicker. People think faster on their feet. They don’t get comfortable and so don’t get distracted by other activities they might be able to do sitting down (opening their laptop for example).

We heard on another podcast recently of a manager who actually takes his leadership team on a walk for their regular weekly meeting. He reported that the meetings are lively, productive and even fun for all concerned.

Hack # 4 - Do. One. Thing.

Study after study after study after study have proven that multitasking reduces your performance. Despite the admiration we might offer to those who can seemingly juggle many things at once, the studies, and experience, shows that doing one thing at a time, and taking regular breaks, gets more done and gets it done more effectively.

This goes back to the earlier point in the email hack about time lost through switching focus and reorienting ourselves. Turn off distractions. Close computer windows that you aren’t working on right now. Close the door. Put your phone in flight mode. Do whatever it takes to allow yourself to do one thing at a time and notice how much more effective you are.

You might even like to try the pomodoro technique. Named after a tomato shaped kitchen timer, it simply involves setting the timer for 25 minutes and then staying on that task till the timer rings. Take a 5 minute break then rinse and repeat. Some pomodoro fans do 50 and 10 minute splits but any longer and your performance will diminish. And if you have a task that should take less than 25 minutes, set a timer accordingly so you don’t get sucked into a time warp where it takes much longer than it could or should have.

Bonus Micro Hacks

If you implement the 4 hacks above you will notice performance improvements for you and your team for sure.

Before we go, here’s a few micro hacks to help amp things up a little more:

• Eat your frogs early. Often we’re tempted to get a bunch of small tasks done and out of the way before tackling the big, important projects that we know are going to take time and effort to complete (the frogs). This is counter productive and almost always ends up with the project eating into a lunch hour, evening or weekend and being done less effectively than if you’d been fresh and unpressured. If you schedule time for the important projects and the urgent tasks then both will get done.
• Limit your objectives. If you’re working on more than 5 current projects at once it’s unlikely you’ll be able to do any of them effectively. If the business requires that more than 5 be done, then your key role is to delegate the leadership of those projects to others. Then you can have oversight of them but without the burden of actioning them
• Triage your activities. We have no problem coming up with ideas of things that could or should be done but most tasks eventually fall off our list over time. While they are on the list though they nag away, crying for attention. This reduces performance. Run your tasks through this filter - Does it really matter to me? Does it matter to my boss? Does it matter to my team? Would it matter if I do it tomorrow? Would it matter if I don’t do it at all?
• Plan tomorrow today. Would you rather go home and sleep well each night knowing that you’ve already got a handle on the following day OR would you rather start each day with uncertainty and overwhelm as you try to sort your priorities for the day? Chances are that if you choose the latter, your mind is going to keep itself busy the night before trying to close open loops and remember everything that needs to be done. This is not conducive to good rest.
• Set the office thermostat for 17 degrees Celcius (63 Fahrenheit). Not too hot and not too cold.

Happy hacking!!