Controlling your accessibility is a time management skill that will increase your overall productivity. Do you pride yourself on your open door policy? Do you take all your own calls, stopping what you’re doing to answer the phone? Do you regularly check your emails throughout the day? Let me ask you, why is being so accessible more important than being productive?
Sometimes you think you have to allow everyone 100% access 100% of the time or people will think you aren’t friendly. You can be friendly, but you need some ground rules. When you were a little kid did your parents let you eat nothing but candy? Of course they didn’t. That wouldn’t have been healthy and neither is being 100% accessible 100% of the time. It may feed your ego making you feel really important because so many people need you, or want to talk to you, but it destroys your productivity.
So, how do you improve your productivity without destroying your relationships? It begins with you asking for assistance, and then training others to help you meet your expectations. When you ask for help rather than demanding compliance, people are always ready to help you out. Let those around you know that you have some changes you have to make because you’ve come to realize that your willingness to be accessible is destroying your productivity. Let them know what your new ground rules are, and specifically how they can help you to live by your own rules.
The very thing that’s feeding your ego is actually undermining your value. Others give your productive time the same level of importance you train them to give it. When you train people that they can interrupt you at any time for any reason you’re really communicating to them that whatever you’re doing isn’t important so interrupting you is no big deal.
You know what you don’t want, and that’s a good place to start. You know that you don’t want to take every call as it comes in, that you don’t want to stop what you’re doing to read and answer a bunch of time waster emails, and you know you don’ want people just dropping in your office any time. Based on what you don’t want identify what you do want, and start from that point to develop and train for your accessibility ground rules. You may be the biggest obstacle in accomplishing this as you’re obviously getting some enjoyment from all these incessant interruptions. Put your focus on the enjoyment you’ll get from increasing your productivity, and the time you can free up to actually enjoy the people who want to communicate with you.
Would you like to learn more about your time behaviors? Try this Time Management Analysis and find out where your opportunities for improvement are.
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