Productivity
Try to find a system that works for you, cause you can’t change the fact that there WILL be a large stream of information coming your way.
You can consider using David Allen’s “Getting things Done” approach:
- Drop means read, understand, and then archive. It’s what you use for anything that doesn’t require any action on your part.
- Always archive, never delete.
- Delegate is for things that do require action, but not from you. Make sure that it gets to the right person and is understood by them, and make a note for follow-up. It can be someone you report to, reports to you or even outside that line.
- Within your own team, you only ever delegate tasks, not responsibility.
- Find the right person that can get the task done.
- Preemptively send them all the information that you think they might need (and that you have access to), rather than relying on them to ask.
- Ask them to acknowledge that they have received what they need.
- Make a note to follow up to see if they need anything else, and follow through by seeing the task to completion.
- Defer means it needs doing, and it’s you who needs to do it, but it doesn’t need doing immediately. Enter it into your task list, and clear it from your inbox.
- Add the task immediately to some sort of queue (for email, this can be a folder named “Needs Reply”),
- Make sure to go through that queue at a later time to prioritize,
- Absolutely ensure that you make time to go back and actually do your prioritized tasks, at a time you consider convenient.
- Do are the (typically very few) things that remain that need to be done by you, and immediately.
- Tell people that you’re doing them, because you’ll want to be uninterrupted. Update your chat status, put some blocked time in your calendar.
- Make sure you’ll be uninterrupted. For email, turn off all your notifications.
- Plow through all the undropped, undelegated, undeferred items in your inbox until it’s empty.