1. Start every week with your plan of action already created. That way we hit the ground running on a Monday morning.
2. Being a leader means achieving results through others. Don’t take short cuts with important time spent reviewing with the team and ensure you make others feel important.
3. “Uncontrolled” time is time where we are not in control of events, for example responding to a crisis or to urgent customer demands. Building in contingency to our planning means that we are not constantly frustrated by not achieving everything on our daily action list.
4. Use whatever system works for you to monitor your workload. Whether you use technology of a simple To Do List it’s important to feel in control of work, and not that it is controlling you.
5. Block out quiet time in your calendar for completing projects or activities that require focus. Your productivity will increase significantly without interruptions and distractions.
6. Delegate effectively – and don’t buy it back!
7. Look at the planned activities that never seem to get done. It’s likely that these should never have been on your To Do List in the first place. Either they could be delegated, or they are simply not important.
8. Scrutinise your regular activities for “babies”. They are those activities or projects that we probably should let go of or delegate, but we continue to hold on to them. They will tend to be activities that we particularly like doing, or feel that we “own” for some reason, but from a commercial or common sense perspective we need to let go.
9. A successful leader will work on creating a powerful future for their area of responsibility, but if we are constantly drawn into resolving day-to-day issues we will never make the time to develop the future.
10. Removing clutter from your life and your workspace will help to remove clutter from your mind, and keep clear focus on achieving results.
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