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Script | 386

Hello, and welcome to episode 386 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. 

This week’s question is about a subject I’ve always been a little afraid of covering. I’m afraid because there is no simple answer, yet it’s certainly one that has a solution. Unfortunately, that solution isn’t an easy one to implement. 

How do you manage your time and productivity in a dynamic, fast changing work environment? 

The problem is that standard advice often doesn’t work. For instance, if you are in IT support and systems and company wide software are continually breaking down, how do you find the time to do focused work, when you are being interrupted by emergencies from the moment you arrive at work to the time you leave? 

It does have a solution, but it involves the word “no” and the use of experience and knowledge to determine how “urgent” something really is. 

I’m currently reading Dominic Sandbrook’s book, Seasons in the Sun. It’s about Britain between 1974 and 1979. Five years when the British government was in perpetual turmoil. Not just dealing with one or two crises. There were hundreds and they were happening every day. 

From economic breakdown to Northern Ireland being on the verge of civil war. Every day brought a new emergency that needed instant solutions. 

Reading it today makes the political turmoils we face now look like a walk on the beach by comparison.

Yet the government managed, just. It wasn’t easy, but they muddled through, and economic collapse and Northern Ireland civil war did not happen. It was close, but these catastrophes were fortunately averted. 

Reading about it now, it seems the UK between 1975 and 1980 was collapsing, yet as Dominic Sandbrook points out, it didn’t and most people were able to get on with their lives and improve their living standards. 

If you’re working in an environment where you feel you are only one crisis away from a total shutdown, don’t despair. It can be handled, and it’s possible to implement some processes and techniques to maintain some sanity when you may feel things are about to fall apart. 

So, with that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. 

This week’s question comes from Jan. Jan asks, Hi Carl, I work in a company with no boundaries. Anyone can send a Teams message to me anytime, and I am expected to deal with it immediately. This means I never have time to do my important work. What advice would you give to someone in my position? 

Thank you, Jan for your question.

One of the most dangerous things one can do is to believe there is no way through when the work piles up and there seems to be no respite. 

The first place I would begin in your situation, Jan, is to look at the type of requests you are getting. Not all of them will be urgent must be done immediately. 

It’s also likely when you look at them, you will find that very few are of that nature. 

Back in the day, when I worked in hotel management, it could be said that no one day was ever the same. And there were a lot of unknowns happening practically every minute. 

Yet, our training was build on understanding what was urgent and what was not. 

A business party turning up at 8:30 am asking where their pre-booked meeting room was, when no such room had been prepared was a drop everything and get the room set up urgently.

Similarly, a guest asking for a hairdryer, was also a drop everything urgency—it was likely they discovered their hairdryer was not working after they had just washed their hair.

Yet most other requests were handled in the normal fashion. A change of towels, a noisy air conditioner that won’t turn off or missing bottles of water from a room’s mini-bar.

All of these “urgencies” would have been unknown when the day began, but given that they happened every day, the hotel had processes in place to deal with them. 

One thing we did have, which I notice many companies do not, is a clear list of priorities. 

Take for example my priorities for handling email. 

Anything to do with money or forgotten passwords are things I will deal with immediately I see the email. Sorting them out doesn’t take long—five minutes for most—but I understand how frustrating it can be waiting to get a response. 

Everything else has a 24 hour response cycle. 

It’s rare I will get either of those two emergencies—perhaps one or two a month—but when they do happen, it’s automatic for me to immediately jump into action and deal with them. 

And that’s one of the first things I would recommend you do, Jan. Categorise the requests you get and put in place some rules for dealing with them. 

What are genuine emergencies? What are not? 

I know if you are new to your company, there will be a period where you will need to learn what’s urgent and what’s not. That’s where experience and knowledge comes into play. 

Given time, you will be able to analyse the types of requests you are getting and learn the patterns. There will be some people you work with that expect immediate responses. Is that a people issue or a genuine problem issue. 

Some people have become conditioned to expect an immediate response. With these people it might be prudent to slowly change their conditioning by gradually reducing your response time. 

Now, of course, you may not be able to do with people in higher positions than you but for others you may be able to do so. 

In Your Time, Your Way, I wrote about how emergency room medical staff use the medical triage method. Each patient is assessed against a scale or urgency. 

A Level 1 needs immediate attention and their condition is life-threatening, Level 2 is urgent attention required as their is potentially a threat to life, Level 3 requires timely intervention but life is not threatened, Level 4 is less urgent, and Level 5 can wait for care.

You can use this approach when you are dealing with customer care or IT issues. 

Monitor the requests you get over a week or so and grade them. You may not need five levels, three or four levels would be sufficient. For example:

A Level one request requires immediate attention.

A Level two request requires attention within two hours

A Level three request can be dealt with within the day

And a Level four can be ignored. 

You will need to be careful not to treat everything as a Level One. If everything was a level one, then nothing would be urgent because everything was. 

One of the great things about this kind of approach is there’s no hesitation. You know exactly what to do. If something is urgent, for example, the whole company’s system goes down or there is a security breach, everything stops until the issue is resolved. 

Hopefully, this kind of emergency won’t happen often. If it does, then there’s likely to be a problem in the company’s systems that need fixing and that would need to be escalated to the relevant person. 

The next problem in these circumstances is that you may feel obligated to be constantly watching your email and internal messaging system. If you want to be able to get on and do your work, that’s going to be a no no. 

You cannot do both. There has to be some flexibility. 

What I’ve found helpful for many of my coaching clients is to protect the first thirty minutes of their work day for going through all t