5 Ways To Crush Disruptions With Simple Time Management

Disruptions are giant time thieves in your life. Have you ever considered how many hours are stolen from your days by other people or situations barging into your schedule?

Tips to help you better manage disruptions:

1. Make time during every aspect of your day for the interruptions that we all experience.

You will never have a single day not disrupted by something unexpected. This is usually what throws women off course. It breaks your concentration, making it harder for you to get the flow back.

If you are at work and a coworker pops in for “just a minute,” you will observe that it repeatedly takes a lot of time. Before you know, an hour passes, and you cannot get time back.

You want to give time for these interruptions by looking at your day and figuring out how much time to devote to disturbances. For instance, if someone walks in your department, you can tell them, “I’m working on a project. I can only spare ten minutes.”

At the end of ten minutes, if they are still around, you tell them, “Sorry, but my time is up. I have to get back to work.” When you appreciate your time, others will, too.

2. Plan your day the night before.

This gives you a go-to launching place. You know what you have to start on first. It helps you manage time if you have a map to follow - even list what you must do that day.

3. Plan phone conversations.

This is a giant time waster. But when you plan your conversations before you call, it helps you stay in control of how long the discussion lasts. When someone calls you, and you need to get off the phone, you say you have to go.

Most people do not want to risk sounding rude to remain in phone conversations taking up their time. Does that sound like you? There are several easy ways to end a phone conversation.

You can say that you are in a time crunch and must go or that you have to take care of something. Usually, this causes the other person to say goodbye and end the call.

It is okay to tell someone you cannot speak to them at that time and will get back to them. The moment you start being someone’s sounding board for problems is when you can begin to get taken advantage of by them.

4. Do not let technology interruptions disrupt your time management.

When someone is not dropping by your office or home, they reach out to you through technology like email or social media. These take up hour after hour of your day because it is effortless to get sucked into playing a game while you are managing something business or personal-related by computer.

If social media is a must for you, let it be a scheduled interruption. For example, you write that you have twenty minutes on social media at lunch on your planner.

Stick to the time allotted just as if it were any other appointment. If you must, use an alarm on your smartphone or set a timer so that you are made aware of the end time of this distraction.

5. Separate interruptions between immediate needs and what can wait.

You do not have to prioritize someone else’s urgency, and you will see this a lot when working on projects. Someone did not get what they needed or did not accomplish what they needed, and suddenly, they want to drop in your lap.

Or, they want you to stop everything you are doing to help them get out of a jam. There is a lot to say for good teamwork, but it is time to put the brakes on bailing others out if this is recurring.