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Handle Tasks Quickly

Usually the best and most efficient way to handle any task is “touch” it once and take care of it rather than taking the time to try to organize the task for later completion.

Tip: Although note that you shouldn’t necessarily take care of tasks as they come in, as doing so will likely diminish your productivity. Instead, you should take care of them at some specified time.

For example, instead of returning phone calls the moment you get a message, instead you can return all your calls during a scheduled block of time that you set aside just for that purpose.

Now let me give you an example of what I mean by “touching” a task once and finishing.

Let’s take email. Sometimes people sort their incoming email into different folders by priority, such as family (non urgent) email into one folder, urgent business email into another folder and then non urgent business email into a third email.

Basically the priority is like this:

High: Urgent business email.
Medium: Non urgent business email.
Low: Non urgent family/friends email.

However, it’s usually NOT a good idea to sort urgent email.

That’s because in order to sort the email, you need to read it and take the time to determine that it’s urgent. Then you continue sorting through your other email and putting them into their proper folders. Finally, you return to your non urgent emails to answer them.

But you’ll need to read them again and then compose your answer. And that means you’ve handled the same email twice in order to reply to it – that’s a waste of time.

Instead, set aside a specific time to answer your email and then read one, answer it and move on to the next email (without sorting). That way you “touch” each email just once, which saves time.

Tip: The exception to this rule is if you do indeed have family and friend emails mixed into your business emails. In that case, in that case, you may want to save your family and friend emails for your non-work hours.

There are two ways to make sure you don’t handle any of these emails twice.

1) You can use a completely separate email for your personal and business emails.

2) If you get personal emails into your business account, then set up your email account to automatically sort personal emails into a “friends and family” folder. Then you can deal with these emails during your free time.

Tags: Time Management

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