Do you find yourself working hard all day, but you don’t get anything done?
Author, entrepreneur, and professor David Horsager encourages us with simple strategies on how to increase efficiency and prioritize our days. We can gain helpful insight from his book The Daily Edge
David explains the most important things we can do to prioritize our days better, starting with a FUN acronym:
First things first.
Under your main priority.
Number attached.
Why is it important to have a number attached to each item on our To-Do list?
“The key is having a number attached. What I mean by that is you can’t say, ‘I’m going to make more calls,’ you can say, ‘I’m going to make five calls,’ then at the end of the day you know if you didn’t do it. You can’t say ‘I’m going to go clean my desk,’ you can say, ‘I’m going to clean two draws,’ or ‘I’m going to clean for twenty minutes.’
Many people spend all day avoiding the most important thing that they need to do today to move the organization forward. This helps us not do that.”
Constant interruptions in our workflow has the greatest negative impact on our productivity.
“People are so much less efficient. It’s great to be able to communicate quickly, but we never anything done! You finally get to a project and ‘Ding!’ Something comes up, ‘Oh! There’s an email!’ You turn around and check your email and then you go back to work, ‘Where was I? Oh – it’s lunchtime I guess I’ll leave it’ and never get anything done.”
An effective strategy for getting things done that David uses in his company, called the Power Hour.
“With the Power Hour, what we do in our company is this: One hour a day, and you might say 90 minutes or two hours, but if you can just do a Power Hour where no one can interrupt; no one is expected to check e-mail, no one has to take a phone call…that hour is that quiet hour focused on your most important thing – it’s unbelievable what you get done in that hour.”
Not all of our organizations will have a regular Power Hour, but that shouldn’t stop us from putting this helpful practice in place, David adds.
“A person anywhere in the organization could lead up and down and say to the people below them and say, ‘…for this hour I’m going to be focused, every day it’s going to be a practice on my behalf,’
To their boss above them you’re going to say, ‘Would you mind, if for that hour, if I just really crank and the most important things done without interruption to serve you better?’ They tend to buy-in and even if they don’t want to take the practice, you do, and you show how much you get done just by having focus, because most organizations, people don’t focus for even ten minutes. The Power Hour is just a time frame to stay absolutely focused and not take calls, not take interruptions, so that you serve people better.”
