If you thought of time as money, maybe you’d stop giving it away so easily. You wouldn’t take the cash you were planning to use for your daily needs and hand it to your project teammate Neil, who will probably ask for more tomorrow.
But those are typical transactions in the workplace, and they can leave you broke.
How do you know when you’ve been giving away too much of your time to meetings and other requests? “There are so many things you keep wanting to do — big, important things — but you don’t have time, because people keep hijacking your time,” says Julie Morgenstern, organizing and time-management expert and author of “Time Management from the Inside Out.” She continues: “Everything you’re showing up for, you’re feeling unprepared for it, like it’s not the best use of your time.”
Reclaim your time, and protect it. Morgenstern and Craig Jarrow, founder of the Time Management Ninja website, offer these tips:
Take control of your Outlook calendar. “If you work in a corporate environment, it seems there’s nothing to stop someone from throwing meetings on your calendar,” Jarrow says. That blissful, uninterrupted two hours you had set aside this afternoon to finally work on the project you’re so behind on? Hijacked! Neil decided that’s the best time for you to meet about something else.
Don’t let Neil determine your schedule. Jarrow suggests making appointments with yourself in Outlook for times to focus on high-priority tasks. Your calendar will show that you’re busy, and thus you’re less likely to be invited to meetings during times when you’re trying to focus. “A lot of people forget that it’s your time — it’s your calendar,” he adds.
Remember: It’s OK to decline meeting invites. “Employees have the right to decline,” Jarrow says. “Just because you get an invite doesn’t mean you need to attend that meeting.” He points out that there are of course caveats. People will notice if you’re MIA for every meeting, and a request from your boss carries more weight than one from Neil.
But otherwise, it’s fine to gracefully decline meetings you feel are a poor use of your time.
Propose shorter meetings. If you’re invited to a meeting you should attend but don’t have the time for — OMG , how did this three-hour monster land on my calendar? — Jarrow suggests proposing a shorter meeting length.
For example, if someone wants to meet for an hour, you could say you only have a half-hour and suggest seeing what you can accomplish in that time. “You’ll surprise yourself,” he says, because you’ll probably work more efficiently and maybe even accomplish the meeting goals in half the originally allotted time.
Speak up to last-minute meeting schedulers. Is there a manager, boss or client (or a few) who seem to make a habit of throwing last-minute meetings on your calendar? Morgenstern suggests distinguishing if these people are typically scheduling meetings for crises caused by outside factors, or, she asks: “Is it just that they’re disorganized and last-minute and have no regard for your time?”
Morgenstern advises addressing the issue with the latter types during a planned, in-person appointment or coffee break — “not in the heat of the moment,” she adds. Start with something like, “Let’s talk about the workflow so I can better serve you,” Morgenstern says, and then describe how the constant last-minute scheduling affects your productivity and costs him or her time and money.
For example, bring up how when you receive last-minute invites, you have to push off work on other projects (which likely affects this person, particularly if it’s your boss) and spend a half-hour rescheduling other appointments and to-dos (which adds up to overtime cost or, for clients, billable hours). Plus, you could say, the later you’re invited to a meeting, the less time you have to prepare for it.
Morgenstern suggests then giving an amount of notice you’d prefer for meetings, asking if that’s reasonable and recommending ways you can help make this change happen.
Don’t feel pressured to say “yes” to every pick-your-brain request. Requests to help others — a new graduate in the industry who wants to glean your advice in a phone call, a colleague in a different department looking to “pick your brain” over coffee — can consume your schedule as well. While you likely want to be helpful, you also need to protect your time to complete your own work.
Morgenstern suggests a few ways to manage the time you commit to these requests: Allocate a certain amount of time each month for these types of meetings — say an hour, which could mean two 30-minute coffee meetings or four 15-minute phone calls — and decline inquiries once you’ve met your quota; refer requests to more knowledgeable (or available) contacts; create an FAQ if you’re typically inundated with emails from new graduates asking the same questions, and send that document in lieu of a phone call or meeting.
The third option could be part of a two-step approach to helping. If the person has follow-up questions to your FAQ, ask him or her to email them to you in advance, and then answer each in a 15-minute phone call to avoid meandering conversations.
“That way, you can cover many more people in a very small unit of time,” Morgenstern says. “You’re helping people, you’re doing good and you’re being efficient.”
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