This blog has recently discussed the challenges with information overload. One of the issues confronting us is that we let things like e-mail control our day. This prevents us from focusing on the key areas of creating either personal or business value. We end up being distracted by any number of things during the day. Whether you work in an office or at home, there are many external distractions that can easily get us off track.
I came across a great article in Inc. magazine the other day. Ilya Pozin, from Inc., interviewed TonyWong, a project management blackbelt whose client list includes Toyota, Honda, and Disney, to name a few. He’s an expert in keeping people on task.
Headlines are:
- Work backwards from goals to milestones to tasks.
- Stop multi-tasking.
- Be militant about eliminating distractions.
- Schedule your email.
- Use the phone.
- Work on your own agenda.
- Work in 60 to 90 minute intervals.
Check out the full article for the details and advice. My favorite was the one on multi-tasking. Switching from task to task quickly does not work. In fact, changing tasks more than 10 times in a day makes you dumber than being stoned. When you’re stoned, your IQ drops by five points. When you multitask, it drops by an average of 10 points, 15 for men, five for women (yes, men are three times as bad at multitasking than women).
Thanks to Ilya and Tony for the excellent advice.
Here is the link to the full article. http://www.inc.com/ilya-pozin/7-things-highly-productive-peolple-do.html
Let me know what you think about this post by commenting below.
Have a great weekend!
Webman
Webman's View 
Webman,
Your article is spot on. It’s amazing how many goat trails you can run down on the web. While exploring new articles and points of view help our creativity it can slow our clock speed on our own internal CPU big time in relation to the rubber meeting the road and getting our work done. Thanks for the post I’ll be following you and your posts in the future.
Marc
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Thanks for the kind words Marc. Much appreciated.
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Webman,
I can totally relate I was a Hospital Engineering Manager I had 65 guys reporting to me and I was on all the committees as well as servicing new construction and all the other departments needs. I received anywhere from 60-85 emails a day and they always sprout children. On top of that you have to be so careful how you write them because they are and or can be distributed to everyone and the higher you get up the corporate ladder the more fragile are the egos. Slap on top of that meetings!!! We even had meetings to discuss having less meetings 🙂
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I hear you Mark. Been there and done that as well. Such a waste of time.
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Hi Webman,
We have published (a while ago) an article on information pollution. Hope you’ll have the time to read it (and maybe comment on it) when you get the chance…
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Thanks for sending along. I will reference this article sometime this week.
All the best.
Webman
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