#5. Plan Your Day
We talked about scheduling time to get from one meeting to another in the previous point but there is an extension to this. Make sure YOU plan your day, not your business associates. All too often I hear management say, "I did not get lunch today" or " I have been on the run and have not had a chance to stop." Come on, get a grip, you are in control and it is up to you.
The first thing you should do in every job you work in, is to make sure you schedule two decent breaks a day which include at least half an hour for lunch and a 20 minute break somewhere else in the day. If you are like most people you will be using something like Microsoft Outlook or Lotus Notes to manage your day. Both allow you to schedule unavailable time in your calendar, so do IT!
By scheduling YOU time, you can ensure you have enough time to have a break, do a little meditation and relax and prepare for the rest of the day. If you are like me and work 16 hours a day, then you should also be putting into your plan a decent Dinner break of at least an hour and half an hour at the gym, even if it is just using the treadmill. If you do not do this, it will catch you up to you and you will be a statistic at 40. Do not laugh, my leading hand lost his life because he did not do the right thing. It can happen to you.
#6. Limit the Amount of Time Spent Dealing With Emails
Technology is a wonderful thing, but when technology rules your life, then you have a big problem and very quickly technology like email can overwhelm you causing you to become stressed. One of the rules my team and I have in the office is that nobody must respond to emails for more than 60 minutes per day. The reason we have put this rule into place, is that many of my team and our corporate clients spend their whole day emailing each other rather than dealing with the issues at hand.
How often have you received an email on one topic and then have the content of the email go off in another direction right before your eyes? I was working in one corporate organization as an external consultant and very often all I would do is simply respond to emails all day long and get nothing done. Most of the emails could have been dealt with a 2 second phone call. In one of the offices I was working in, it was an open plan office layout and I had a bloke working directly across from me, who refused to speak to me or anyone else on the floor and all he did was when he had an issue, he would send an email.
