There are 24 hours in a day and 365 days in each year. Time is finite, you cannot get any more, you can only use it effectively. Doing the right thing, at the right time, for the right amount of time is critical to your success.
Pareto’s law or the 80/20 principle states “80% of your results come from 20% of activities. It means that for one day a week you are 16 times more productive than the other 4. How is this true? Very few of your activities are productive, they just don’t cut it. These are low payoff activities. High payoff activities, on the other hand, really bring home the bacon.
Prioritisation is the key; do more high payoff activities, less low payoff. Sound simple? Well, it’s not. Contribution to your success and Importance is sometimes hard to assess. Just to make life more difficult; relative urgency changes over time. A lot of your time is gobbled up by events and people with no interest in your schedule. Interruptions take up an utterly unfair share of your valuable time; email leads the way followed closely by the phone just beating unexpected crises into third place.
Scheduling, communication and training help optimise your effectiveness. If you are in a role with yearly performance targets, plan the year. Work out how you are going to achieve your goal, the resources needed and overall strategy. Get into more scheduling detail monthly, even more weekly and take the time to plan each day at the close of play on the previous day.
Make sure you communicate your plan to everyone who needs to know. Include people in your organisation, and, when appropriate, outside the company. Inside is relatively apparent, outside maybe not quite so obvious. If you are getting interrupted by crises emanating from outside the organisation its worth establishing times you are available to deal with them and times you are not. There is a good chance you will be able to channel a significant proportion into time scheduled for the purpose, away from time set aside for your high payoff activities.