Permission to Limit Your Admin Time - Granted
By Tana M. Mann Easton, Lead Efficiency Engineer
Through the years, I have heard countless colleagues and clients complain about the amount of time they spend on administrative work. They have jobs to do that often require strategic, specialized thinking and work, but they feel held back from actually tackling that work due to their email inboxes and other busy bureaucratic tasks. Unless you purposely restrain administrative work, it will often expand to highjack every minute of every day. So introducing constraints into your work day is a way to wrestle back your time.
In Cal Newport’s book, A World Without Email, he suggests that you simulate your own support staff. What that means is you section your workday into two separate categories – specialist and support. For example, you might designate 12-1pm and 3-5pm as your support hours. During these hours you do only administrative tasks like answering emails, scheduling meetings, submitting expense reports, etc. And during all other hours, you only work on tasks and projects that are skilled and high value. These are your specialist hours when you work on what you do best. Keep in mind, you want to make sure that the hours when you do your best thinking/have the most energy are saved for specialist work since administrative tasks usually don’t require as much brain power.
I love this idea of setting specific hours when you do your administrative tasks. While every day might not run exactly as you plan, at least having a plan to limit the time you spend doing your administrative tasks means you should free up more time to do your specialist work than if you just mindlessly and haphazardly sit in your inbox all day.
If you or your team would like to sign up for our 2 hour Balance and Productivity training to instantly double your meaningful output and find the feeling of lasting flow and optimized work life balance, please click here and say hello!
Sincerely Yours,
Focus to Evolve Team