It’s tempting to cruise through this time in “maintenance mode”, meaning that we respond to e-mail, have spontaneous conversations or generally bounce from urgent task to urgent task, often rushing into our next commitment stressed and unready to engage. The most challenging time sinks are when we have ten to fifteen minutes between our major commitments.
Now, imagine that everyone on your team took ten minutes before the meeting to think through (1) what are we really trying to do in this meeting?, (2) what is my unique contribution to the conversation?, and (3) how will we know the meeting is finished? Not only would everyone arrive at the meeting on time, they would also come ready to contribute to a productive conversation.Įven if you can’t change your team culture, what if you implemented a practice of taking ten minutes before each meeting to answer these questions? It would make you more focused, a better contributor and more aligned throughout your day with what’s expected of you. Finally, ten minutes in, the real meeting kicks off. The conversation at the beginning feels like a long train struggling to gain forward momentum. Tell me if this sounds familiar: it’s meeting time and everyone comes rushing in from their previous commitment. A moment can seem like an hour, and an hour can be fleeting. In a similar way, taking fifteen quiet minutes at the very beginning of your day to review your schedule and priorities and decide where your focused pockets of productive work are going to happen can make a huge difference in your productive output.Ĭontrary to popular belief, all time is not created equal. Accordingly, no matter how many times they’ve flown a plane, all pilots go through a final pre-flight checklist to make sure that they’re ready to fly and haven’t missed any crucial steps. What if you were to take a bit of time at the beginning of the day to clarify your objectives and set priorities for the day? What if you were to do a last minute assessment of your upcoming day and choose when you were going to do your most important work?Īirplane pilots understand how familiarity can dull the senses. They jump out of bed, turn on the TV, grab some coffee, check e-mail and – for some – spend time getting the family ready for the day. What do you do when you get out of bed? Many people jump into their day in a scattered manner. By turning these Time Sinks into Time Warp moments, we can set ourselves up for greater daily productivity.
These “Time Sinks” can cause us to lose heart, feel lazy and generally lose our productive momentum.Ĭontrary to popular belief, all time is not created equal. Have you ever reached the end of your day and found that your biggest priorities were largely untouched? How can it be that no matter how many lists we make and how many times we review our priorities, time continues to slip through our hands? Often the source of these time sinks is a lack of diligence at a few critical moments throughout the day.
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