I sometimes hear “There’s no point in Time Management, no point in planning ahead, because my day never goes as planned”.
I have four things to say about that, which I hope will help:
1 – Get better at saying No, or at least negotiating. Many interruptions can be rejected or pushed out into tomorrow so you can still stick to your plan.
2 – Leave gaps for the things that are going to crop up. Given that for most of us it’s probably 50% of our day that is used on sudden interruptions and tasks cropping up, we need to keep 50% free for just these types of things. If your diary is already rammed for tomorrow then of course you won’t be able to stick to your plan, and you’ll end up postponing stuff that just shouldn’t have ever been in there in the first place. This means that, slightly counter-intuitively, you need to start saying “no” BEFORE your diary is full – start saying “Sorry, I’ve got no time left, how about the day after?” even though you’re looking at a big empty patch in your diary for tomorrow. That patch will be gone by the time you get there, so don’t give it away now.
3 – Get to the underlying causes of these things that are ruining your planned day. Take a bit of time to eradicate the causes so they don’t keep repeating. Always ask yourself “WHY did that interruption come up? How could it have been prevented?”
4 – Set up systems so that you can easily cope with whatever comes up – spare copies ready printed in case the customer suddenly asks for one, people on call in case someone goes off sick, other people trained up who can go to a meeting instead of you if necessary, a spare printer in case the main one is busy or runs out of ink. If you can’t get rid of the emergent problems you can at least have measures in place to reduce their impact.
Even with the above four in place you’ll still get the occasional bad day or big crisis, but most of your time will now be yours.
Method number one gets you from 20 things cropping up to only 15. Number two gives you room for 5 to fit in so you only have 10 affecting your plan. Number three will reduce the 20 to 15 in future, so your problem will be just five you can’t say no to or fit in. And number four will mean that those 5 only have the effect of two.  Sorted!
Onwards and upwards
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