Case of the Mondays- Are you Managing Your Time Efficiently?
Many of us set out each day, especially each Monday, with a spring in our step and the greatest of intentions to do many of the business tasks that we have been putting off for far too long. History has shown, however, that as business owners or managers when we walk through the door to the office our best laid plans are going to be sidetracked.
Mondays seem to frequently start for me as mentioned above and then quickly spiral out of control; all of a sudden it is 6:30 or 7 pm and while I have been frantically busy all day, I have not checked one item off of my best laid Monday plan. Unlike Office Space, as a CEO, this is what I call our Case of the Mondays. While I will take our Mondays over the cubicle nation Mondays depicted in the movie any day, I still feel less than fulfilled after a day like this of heavy firefighting.
I recently read a great article by Peter Bregman for Harvard Business Review with tangible steps to managing your day. As today is a Monday and we still have four more days left this week, I thought this might be particularly applicable to making the most out of not just tomorrow but the rest of the week.
[Below is an excerpt from Harvard Business Review]
An 18-Minute Plan for Managing Your Day
Yesterday started with the best of intentions. I walked into my office in the morning with a vague sense of what I wanted to accomplish. Then I sat down, turned on my computer, and checked my email. Two hours later, after fighting several fires, solving other people’s problems, and dealing with whatever happened to be thrown at me through my computer and phone, I could hardly remember what I had set out to accomplish when I first turned on my computer. I’d been ambushed. And I know better.
Author: Alexandra Gibson
Alexandra is the CEO of Gibson Design Management and Managing Partner of interior design firm, Gibson Design Group. When she's not busy trying to build an empire, you can find Alexandra riding a horse, giving back to the community, playing with her Scottie, McCord, or drinking a martini (preferably not all four at once).
Follow Alexandra on TwitterTags: CEO, efficiency, Harvard Business Review, Mondays, Peter Bregman, Time Management
This entry was posted on Monday, August 24th, 2009 at 6:20 pm and is filed under Organization, Running an Interior Design Firm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
August 25th, 2009 at 10:26 am
Alexandra,
What a wonderful article. Ironically I was just going to blog about that today on my blog! I so agree with this. Another person who follows this is Dave Lakahani who is
a master sales person and he talks about the 45-15 minute plan. Forty five minutes of total focus with 15 minutes of planning for the next 45 minutes.
I am a recovering multi-tasker who has found (as much as I HATE to admit it,but silence while you are working is golden and you get a lot more done!
Thanks for this!
Deborah
August 26th, 2009 at 12:59 pm
Definition of irony: I’m working on research for an important project. I stopped for a moment to chk the Twitter stream and saw your tweet about the Twinterns and clicked the link to the FB page where I saw the note about your post here. I clicked in and then clicked through to the wonderful post on the 18-minute plan at HBR. And just as I finished reading that one it hit me: I’d stopped working on what was supposed to be important and was instead reading about how to keep focused on what’s important!
Well, maybe given my social media ADD, reading your post and Peter’s actually was important!
I’m going back to the other work now. But first, thanks for the quality interruption.