Time Management: To-Do Lists are Not Working. Try This!

Going into office in the morning, sipping your coffee while checking your emails , you know you have a busy day ahead. Whether meetings, interviews, site visits, phone calls, customer servicing, engine fixing, etc. everyone has their own res ponsibilities and tasks. In terms of work-load, almost all of us have plenty of th at. But where we differ is in our results and outcomes i.e. the delivery. Delive ring quality work differs from delivering average work. For that, some employees are STARS while the majority is average They work just hard enough not to get fi red as George Carlin likes to put it. Every employee reaps what he/she planted in terms of salaries, commissions, bene fits and/or bonuses. STAR employees exist in every organization because they do several things differently from what the majority does. This gives them the edge in exceeding the others in terms of paychecks, positions and success.. Among th ese things that they do, time management sits atop. Unfortunately most people do nt believe that time is our most valuable asset. They squander it and thus producin g average or below-average results. But, for some, these results may not reflect their true and ambitious intentions. They may be trying and striving but all in the wrong means; success and failure are measured by the quality of work not by the quantity of it. So for these people I say, better than working harder, work SMARTER. Start by managing your time. Having a to-do list would be excellent bu t I think its a bit early. Why not try a stop-doing list first! While reading Jim Collins Good to Great, I came across this interesting yet simple idea: Most of us lead busy but undisciplined lives. We have ever-expanding to do lists, t rying to build momentum by doing, doing, doingand doing more. And it rarely works . Those who built the good-to-great companies, however, made as much use of stop doing lists as to do lists. To-do lists can go on and on especially for people who are exceptional time-wast ers and are trying to change. Changing ones habit, you know, isnt an overnight pro cess. It takes practice, persistence and a whole lot of patience and commitment to succeed. Most people will start by jotting down their tasks for the day. They will stuff too many chores that are not reasonable even for the very discipline d of employees. At the end of the day, there are two possible outcomes: either t he crosses on the to-do list are so few that finishing them would take more than 24 hours-a-day or all the chores are done but with minimum concentration and ef fort on each which leads to a bigger problem than the initial one. On the other hand, stop-doing lists are much more effective. Reflecting on a nor mal routine day, we see that many hours are spent on doing time-wasting and dist racting activities. Checking emails, for instance, every 20 minutes leads to a d ivided attention on the task being executed thus a disappointing result. Whereas , turning off the email notifer and managing our email-checking to 3 , 4 times-a -day would necessarily bring a much more satisfactory outcome in any given task. The same goes to all these Pings, Beeps and notification alerts that never stop reminding us of their existence. So starting with incremental steps of stop-doing what we are used to do leads to doing what we are supposed to do. By gradually stopping some of our daily fail ro utines and habits we are steadily accomplishing more of our stocked work and del ivering better results. Every one of us knows how they spend their time at work, so going into detailed examples of what should be stopped is pointless. Once we grasp the idea that we are judged and paid in terms of the quality of work we produce, we can start com

mitting to bettering ourselves. Stop-doing lists which may alter our habits and get us out of our comfort zones will definitely bring in those bucks we crave fo r and in consequence lead us to respect our time at work. So start working a little smarter, commit to stop doing what wastes your preciou s time and knock yourself out with the goods of your results!