Managing Messaging Services, Setting Boundaries, and Prioritizing Tasks

How do you find a solution to your time management and productivity problems if you have no time to stop and find those solutions? That’s what we are exploring this week. 

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Script | Episode 298

Hello, and welcome to episode 297 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.

Have you ever stopped and given some thought to why you are struggling with managing time and productivity? I mean, asked yourself why you have over a thousand emails in your inbox, a desktop full of files, images and PDFs, and are unable to find anything you need to get your work done.

One of the first steps to becoming better organised, getting in control of your time and completing your work on time is to establish what the problem is. Knowing that will help you to find the solution to getting everything back in control. 

Too often, people look for a solution to a problem that has not been fully explored. Or worse, shut down the possibility of a solution because they feel their situation is unique. It isn’t. Millions of people have been in the same position and have found a working solution. It may mean having to make some difficult decisions and perhaps upset a few people who have been exploiting your good nature, but I can promise you there is a solution. 

This is what this week’s question is all about. Finding solutions to the issues that are causing you to lose control of your time and feel out of control. 

So, let me take this opportunity to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. 

This week’s question comes from Julie. Julie asks, hi Carl, I am struggling to keep my head above water with my work. I was recently promoted to managing a team of eight people, and now I am getting hundreds of emails, need to attend double the number of meetings I used to attend and have to work an extra three or four hours a day just to stay on top. Is there any advice you could give me?

Hi Julie, thank you for your question. 

Starting a new position is always challenging. Your core work changes, and that means the routines and processes you had in place before your promotion will need to change. It can be disorientating and, worse, very time-consuming as you adapt and develop new routines and processes. You will need to give it a little time to get these in place. 

However, there are a few other factors to take into consideration, and that is things like a sudden doubling in the number of meetings you need to attend. Let’s say you had five one-hour meetings a week before your promotion, and now you have ten hours. This means you have effectively lost five hours of your work week or one hour a day. If you were busy before, you are now busy and having to cram everything in with five hours a week less. 

The problem with meetings is more often than not; you will come away from each one with more tasks to do. So, five hours lost and more tasks to do. Not a great situation to find yourself in. 

A question I would ask is, do you really need to attend all those meetings? You have a team of eight people. Would it be possible to delegate attendance at some of these meetings to your team? They can take notes and fill you in if there is anything important for you to know.

There must be hundreds of meetings going on at Microsoft every day, but I am sure Satya Nadella does not attend all of them. He has to be very selective about which meetings he attends. 

Part of moving into a leadership role is learning to delegate, and to do that, you need to learn to trust your team. 

The great thing about delegation is you learn very quickly the strengths and weaknesses of your team members. This will help you become a better leader. And you can decide which of your team needs extra training. 

Now, that’s the leadership side of things. What about your personal work? Well, here, as I alluded to at the start you need to stop and take a step back and see where you are struggling. Without that, you will be running around in circles, not being able to find a solution. 

One area I find people struggle with today is the volume of messages coming at them. We’re receiving fewer phone calls—which is a good thing—but a lot more instant messages and messages. However, the good news here is this is something we can control. 

For example, a lot of issues with messages is we have too many channels. If you’re using WhatsApp, Microsoft Teams, instant messages and many more, the problem has a simple solution. Reduce the number of channels you are available on. 

I’m sure you’ve heard of Dolly Parton, the legendary country and western singer; she has a fantastic solution to too many messages. She only communicates via fax. Now, you could laugh at that, but in reality, it’s genius. How many companies and people want to reach out to Dolly? Thousands. For anyone to reach out to her, they would genuinely want to. The inconvenience they would have to go through to communicate with her is tremendous. This means the only messages she gets are genuine ones. No spam, no CC’d emails, nothing. Just genuine messages. 

Now, I am not suggesting you need to move to communicating via fax, but the principle is fantastic. Force people to communicate with you on your terms. 

You see, the reason why we are inundated with messages today is because of the ease it is to send a message. With it being so easy, people don’t think if what they are sending is helpful or a distraction. Most CC’d messages, for instance, are not helpful. I work with many top executives, and to them, all these CC’d messages are not only a distraction, they are annoying, which knocks off their focus and places them in a terrible mood.

When it’s a little more difficult to contact you, if someone really does need to contact you, they will find a way. 

I heard today that Sadique Khan, the Mayor of London, refused to join WhatsApp during the COVID pandemic so central government ministers could join him in group chats. The ministers in the central government had to send him emails instead. 

Theoretically, the Mayor of London is junior to the Health Minister in Westminster, yet he had no problem saying no to joining WhatsApp. And in the end, he got a lot less rubbish, and what he did receive was meaningful and helpful. (It also prevented him from being criticised in the UK Government’s COVID enquiry.)

Always remember that you chose to join these messaging services, so it’s nobody else’s fault if you become inundated with messages. This is also the same with email. If you freely give out your name card and give your email address to any company that asks for it, then you need to find a way to deal with the consequences of those choices. 

It may be your company’s policy to communicate through Teams or Slack, and if that is the case, then you will need to work with it. One thing I would suggest is to turn on your do not disturb at some times throughout the day. If you can develop the habit of doing some undisturbed focus work, say between 9:30 and 11:30 am, turn on Do Not Disturb. If anyone complains, explain that is the time you do your work. You will only need to explain that once. Clients, bosses and colleagues quickly learn your habits and respect them. 

If you don’t believe me, try it for a week. If you do get called in by your boss, talk to them. Explain the situation. Bosses are not evil, you know? They will probably adopt your practice and give you a bonus for having such a brilliant idea. 

I recently watched a talk by Jim Donovan, vice chairman of global client coverage at Goldman Sachs, who was talking about “Optimal Client Service”. Of the points he spoke about, all of them made sense until he began talking about always being available for your clients. He argued that you should always be instantly available for your clients at any time of the day. For me, this is a big no-no. 

You see, the problem with this is not the idea. It’s a good idea if you are in client services. The problem is this approach is not sustainable 100% of the time. 

While many flights do have WIFI these days, it’s not reliable, and I know from experience when flying between Asia and Europe, I am not going to be able to respond to messages or emails for the 15-hour flight. Equally, you should never be expected to be instantly available for your clients when not working, or are sick or even when visiting the bathroom. There needs to be some barriers. 

If something is not 100% sustainable, then you are setting too high an expectation and breaking that expectation just once will damage both your and your company’s reputation. It’s far better to be upfront with your clients and explain the best way to contact you and a reasonable time in which to respond. 

Sure, it’s hard to do that when you are trying to win the client over, but your future self will thank you for doing that hard thing now. 

The final piece of advice is to write out what your priorities are each week. This does not need to take up hours and hours of your time, twenty minutes max. But when you move towards a leadership role, you do not have time for dealing with trivial things. You need to keep your eye on the majors. Again, you will need to trust your team. Give them space to do their work and delegate so you can remain focused on the priorities. 

Where do you find your priorities? What are your team’s objectives? Are you meeting them? What are your responsibilities? Are you adhering to your responsibilities? Staying focused on these each week will reduce the work you have to do and allow you to spread the load a little with your team. 

I hope that has helped, Julie. Thank you for your question. 

And thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.