Time Management Tip - Avoid Announcements

Avoid announcements

When you are working on your computer and you get announcements all the time, like a new e-mail in your inbox or a notice someone wants to contact you on MSN or Yahoo, this will get you out of your productivity zone. Announcements will make you multi task and you do not want to do this.

Amidst work deadlines and project teams, interruptions seem inevitable. At first glance, they may appear harmless but persistent interruptions throughout your workday can cause you to feel unfocused, overwhelmed, and frustrated.As much as we would like to believe the contrary, interruptions are part of our daily routine.

They pull you out of your current focus and into someone else’s world. It generally results in unproductive and inefficient work behavior. It can prove quite costly to your productivity and satisfaction at work.

Whether they take the form of an impromptu meeting, personal demands, emails, or conversation with co-workers, these unplanned engagements or activities have tendency to rob us of our time throughout our days and these tend to get you irritable and will obviously stir your mood especially when you’re working on a very important matter.Some can be eliminated but the fact remains that many cannot. So you have to learn how to manage them better if you can’t eliminate them at all.

Before you log on to your messenger, make sure your status is set to be busy or better yet appear offline to all of your contacts.

But then being in a busy status, you can add up a personal message to it that you’re working on something vital that you can not entertain other things besides that certain work. It will give the person an impression that you can’t be disturbed or you can’t engage to his o her concerns for the meantime.

You just can’t simply ignore all of the people requesting for a bit of your time. Everything may be important to the person who is asking your assistance so acknowledge it rather than dismiss it at all.

You can be really sensitive to how he or she feels but some things can actually wait.

But what matter here is that you make the person feel good about waiting. Once the person tells you how pressing the matter is, you now have the choice to handle it in the immediate moment or table it for another time. You’ll find many requests can be postponed since they are not truly critical emergencies. Then you can set the time when you can talk about the person’s concern. Be realistic that you can’t simply attend to their needs for you have your own job to get done.

You can schedule the conversation at a time which you know will not aggressively competing with other tasks that you need to handle which in fact commands your attention.

Taking this approach takes off the risk of coming across as self righteous.

You can honor the person’s request, while respecting the boundaries you are setting to protect yourself from other people’s continued demands of your time.

Stop competing with distractions and simply learn to manage them and the expectations people have of you.