3 signs you're wasting time at work
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(MoneyWatch) COMMENTARY When we think about wasting time at work, certain images come to mind: Playing Angry Birds, for instance, or posting on Facebook. But those are obvious time wasters. What's more insidious are things that look like work -- calls, emails, meetings -- but are not actual work. What do I mean by "not actual work"? They're not advancing you toward your career goals. Here are three signs you're not optimizing your time:
1. You're a font of knowledge on tabloid-fodder crimes. I get it. Conference calls are boring (see related post: 22 Things to do during that boring conference call). It's tempting to hop on over to a newspaper's website and go to your happy place as you read about the foibles of humanity. Being up on the news is good for our careers, right? But if your involvement on a call is so tangential that you can read about which teacher was arrested this week for sleeping with her students maybe you shouldn't be on that call.
2. You spend all day in your inbox. When you're deeply involved in a project you care about, you tend to let the email pile up, dealing with it in batches. When you're not focused? You click over every few minutes, answer things that didn't need to be answered quickly, get concerned about exactly what you're cc'ed on, and otherwise fritter away hours.
3. Your schedule is packed with things you won't be mentioning at your retirement dinner. Frankly, you're not even sure you'd mention them on next year's performance review. In general, meetings aren't our jobs. They're tools to do our jobs -- moving our organizations forward toward profitability or other goals. If you've been in meetings all day, but can't point to anything that changed in the world as a result, maybe you need to rethink those meetings.
What signals do you think show you're wasting time? Share your comments below!
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Whether they admit it or not, I suspect that anoyone working in an entirely open plan office has the same issue.
Yes, facilities managers love open plan offices as it makes their job easy. Very easy to slip in an extra desk here or there, don't have to move a team because it's outgrown the room it's in or have a team of 4 in a room that will house 10.
In "The Effective Executive", Peter Drucker recommended that all executives (we'd now use Knowledge Worker for people fulfilling the same sort of role) set aside two 90 minute slots a week to work on their key objectives. Good advice. At the time he was writing these people had offices, with doors that could be closed and usually a secreatary who could field calls, take messages and deflect visitors (or at least judge if they or their issue was important enough to interrupt). Unfortunately, we no longer have that situation. People doing the same sort of work of gathering data, thinking, deciding and reporting back are in cubicles or open plan offices with no door and no secreatary, at the mercy of anyone wandering past who thinks their issue must be more important than whatever the person is working on. In "Peopleware" Demarco and Lister studied various work environments and concluded that optimum for Knowledge Workers was an office where only people from the same team were based, each person was able to customise their work area to their own needs and was able to ask others to not disturb them whilst they were on a particular piece of work.