Whenever you’re about to take on something new, ask yourself whether it fits or not, whether it’s really yours to do. Don’t take on anything that doesn’t strongly relate to your goals. Remember them? Every manager has specific, measurable goals that clearly set out what they should achieve, but how many ever look at them, never mind work to them, once they’ve been written.ĭon’t just set them and forget them if you’re feeling out of control, look at your goals at least once a day and make sure what you’re doing is what you should be doing. The key to calming this storm of activity, it seems, is to focus firmly on what is important, not on what is urgent. As much as we complain about the pressure, we get a kick out of being in demand, indispensable. In many ways there’s an addictive quality to this type of behaviour we’re keyed up, on edge, waiting for the next hit, the next email, the next interruption. In effect, they lose the ability to say no to others and to themselves. Instead, they get caught up in what London Business School’s Lynda Gratton calls “active non-action.”īy this she means that many managers get so overwhelmed by the demands of their jobs that they become highly reactive to what’s going on around them and lose the ability to be masters of their own destinies. Research shows that only about 10% of managers take persistent and effective action to achieve their goals the other 90% mean to but somehow don’t get around to it. – Smartphones, as we know, combine mobile phone, push email, text messaging, internet faxing and web browsing, to name but a few of their many distractions
– Checking your emails every 5 minutes will cost you 8.5 hours a week – An office worker works for three minutes before being interrupted – It takes an average of 64 seconds to recover your train of thought after you’ve been interrupted His 2009 book, The Tyranny of Email, has echoes of Charles Hummel’s 1967 essay The Tyranny of the Urgent, in which he singles out the humble telephone for similar criticism. After receiving 72 emails in one hour, John Freeman, editor of Granta magazine, was spurred to write a critical analysis of the maelstrom that is modern communication.Įmail, he argues, distracts us from what is truly important and fractures our concentration so much that we become ineffective.
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