If you're an assistant to someone, chances are you spend a LOT more time in someone else's calendar than your own. In fact, you may not even realize you have a calendar of your own! But one of the best things you can do to keep yourself on track and using a Timeblock is to put it in the calendar, and look at it every day. This will prevent you from overcommitting yourself in any given day, and will also enable you to plan ahead so you can make the best use of your most precious resource: your time.
Another Step: Timeblocking Each Individual Day or Week
As different situations arise from week to week, you may need to block out more time in a given week to work on a short-term project, or prepare for a big meeting. It is a good practice to review your week's schedule either first thing Monday, or the Friday before, to see if you may need to add more focused time to your Timeblock for the week. You may even decide this happens frequently enough that you need to add "Project Time" to each week. You can designate how this time will be used from week to week, but by blocking it out you will be able to commit that time on a regular basis.
Sharing Your Timeblock
The first thing you will need to do to make your Timeblock a reality is to share it with others. First, you will want to share this information with your boss or supervisor. You will need to have their buy-in and support if you're ever going to make this schedule work, because it is all too tempting to let them pull you off task because of their position of authority. If they have no idea that you've committed to the importance of running reports from 8am-9am on Tuesday mornings, they will continue to drop by your desk or send you emails and expect an immediate response during that time - and you may feel guilty putting them off or disappointing them. But if you help them to understand how it benefits them (or the team as a whole) to allow you to stay on task during that time, then all you'll need to do is quickly remind them: "Hey, I'm timeblocked to work on reports right now so I really need to focus, but if you send me an email I'll be happy to get back to you on that when I have some white space at 9:30am."
The same rule applies to your teammates and co-workers. If someone from the sales team repeatedly distracts you, or the girl in the cubicle next to you frequently stops by to talk, just remind them about your timeblock. If you've shared it with them, and asked them to respect it, then you can avoid a lot of frustration or hurt feelings, or the temptation to get pulled off-task yourself. In fact, once your teammates see the benefit of your Timeblock, you can ask them not only to refrain from distracting you from it, but you can ask them to go one step further and hold you accountable to it. Ask someone you trust to keep a copy of your timeblock handy, and to remind you of your commitments and ask you if you're sticking to it.
Another way in which you may choose to share your Timeblock is to educate your clients. This may or may not be appropriate, depending upon the type of clients you work with. I have seen this done effectively by utilizing the wonderful modern technology available with voicemail and email auto-reply features. For example, you may record a daily voicemail, stating the times that day that you will be returning calls. This is especially useful if your day is compressed, and your response time limited. If you will be in a meeting or working on a large project that will take up a large part of your day, you may also opt to implement an email auto reply. Here's an example of a script you could use:
Thursday, April 12th - I will be in meetings for most of the day today, with very limited access to email. If you have an urgent need, please call our office and another of my talented associates will do their best to assist you. Otherwise, I will reply to your message as soon as I am able. Thank you for your patience!
Dealing With Urgent Needs: Slide
As I mentioned before, when your role is a reactive one, it's unavoidable that much of your time will be spent.....reacting. And sometimes, even with a great level of commitment to your Timeblock, you will need to put it aside to deal with an urgent need. Before you do so, ask yourself, 'Is this truly urgent? What will the consequence be if I do not take care of this right this minute?' If the answer is yes and you cannot live with the consequence, then you absolutely should go take care of that situation.
However, your Timeblock does not need to go "out the window" just because you have to take care of something else in that moment. If something in your Timeblock is truly that important, then you need to learn to SLIDE. What I mean by this is, you should not cancel, delete or erase anything of value on your Timeblock. Find another time, and slide that appointment.
One of my highest payoff activities is my weekly meeting with each of my coaches. If this meeting doesn't happen in any given week, our communication suffers. When our communication suffers, our clients start to see a negative impact on their experience. So, it is of prime importance that I make sure those meetings happen. This doesn't mean that we always need to move heaven and earth to make the meeting happen at exactly the time it was originally scheduled (though it usually does). But on those occasions where it can't - an important meeting needs to be scheduled, one of us is on vacation that day, one of us is not feeling well, etcetera - we find another time. The meeting slides to the afternoon, or the next day, but it HAPPENS.
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