Are you constantly interrupted by visitors, phone calls, emails and crises which interrupt your work day, waste your time and stress you out? If so, then you need to put some good time management strategies into place to control these interruptions. Such interruptions are a product of busy, fast-paced and ‘always available’ working lives. Although you can’t necessarily eliminate them, you can learn time management strategies to control interruptions once they do occur.
What you do before, during and after interruptions is more important than attempting to eliminate them.
Controlling interruptions can be an ongoing problem if your work involves juggling a variety of small and large tasks and you feel that it is your duty to always be accessible to clients.
The first step to controlling an interruption is to identify what it is and recognise where it’s coming from. Interruptions that most people can identify with are caused by:
- Lack of self-discipline
- Telephone and email interruptions
- Drop-in visitors
- Visual distractions and noise
- Socialising and idle conversation
- Crises
Once you’ve identified your biggest time wasters, you are well on your way to developing time management strategies to control interruptions during your work day. The top two on the above list are the most common culprits. Let’s look at them in closer detail.
Lack of self-discipline
An essential step in regaining control of your day is to identify how you are mismanaging your time with internal interruptions. Some common ways you can interrupt yourself from your important tasks and goals are:
- Remembering something you were supposed to do;
- Checking your emails all day long;
- Being distracted by piles of paper or disorganisation;
- Spending time on unimportant non-priority tasks;
- Letting your mind wander away from the focus of your work;
- Reading irrelevant material;
- Taking extended tea breaks, personal calls and socialising.
Avoid self-inflicted interruptions by striving to stick to the task at hand. It’s not necessary to constantly check your emails, to take a non-urgent phone call or do an unimportant routine task that you have forgotten. You can combat these kinds of interruptions by effective planning and by managing how your time is best spent.
No matter how busy your working day can get, even with competing demands and bound by a limited time frame, planning means you can be far more productive, work more efficiently and actually achieve set objectives.
If you haven’t planned your day effectively, have unrealistic time estimates or attempt too much at once, you may be sabotaging your time by constantly interrupting yourself.
The trick is to identify what it is you need to do, how long it will take you and then to block out the time in your workday to actually do it.
Once you have blocked out your time, concentrate on your task during the time you have allocated yourself, then move on to your next one. A good idea is to double your estimated time for each of your tasks to accommodate for any urgent interruptions.
It is also a good idea to block out at least half an hour a day to deal with any emergency crisis that might arise but remember the better you plan ahead, the fewer ‘crises’ will arise. Once the interruption has been dealt with, try to get right back to the task at hand as soon as possible.
Telephone and email interruptions
The ideal way of dealing with these is to plan to be unavailable. Let your messages go to voicemail, or if you have one, use your virtual secretary to screen calls. If neither of these options are available, it’d be best to leave your desk and work in another location where you can’t be reached for a while.
When leaving messages advise the best time you can be contacted and for incoming calls, plan a timeframe when you will be available.
The same applies for email – return all non-urgent emails when you have scheduled to do so and limit your email checking to four times a day. Most importantly turn off the new mail notification sound and message in your email box, as this can be distracting when you are trying to concentrate.
