• “The Three Resolutions”
  • Personal Value Statements
  • Set Some Goals – A 3R Form
  • Three Resolutions Podcast
  • Time and Self Management Books
  • Values Development Exercise
  • Who I am
  • Your Best Year Ever – Programmes

THE THREE RESOLUTIONS

~ Your Personal Mission Controller – Self-Leadership That Works

THE THREE RESOLUTIONS

Tag Archives: interruptions

Put your focus on focusing.

03 Friday Jan 2020

Posted by threeresolutionsguy in Discipline, Time Management, Uncategorized

≈ Comments Off on Put your focus on focusing.

Tags

"Circle of Influence", "time management", Circle of Concern, Circle of Focus, focus, interruptions, productivity, Stephen R Covey"

Last October I wrote about the Circle of Influence, and in doing so I made a fleeting mention of the briefly identified but ne’er seen again ‘Circle of Focus’.

Just to recap, Covey had detailed the Circles of Concern (everything affecting our lives) and Influence (things upon which we can have an effect) in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. In his later First Things First he and his co-authors went further and defined a further, inner Circle of Focus.

They defined it as ‘things we are concerned about, that are within our ability to influence, that are aligned with our mission and are timely.’

He went on: ‘When we operate within our Circle of Influence we do some good, but what we do may be at the expense of something better. When we set and achieve goals that are in our Centre of Focus, we maximise the use of our time and effort.’

The question arises, therefore – how much time do we spend administering, pandering, diverting, interrupting (and being interrupted) and time-wasting at the expense of the time we should spend within that focused centre?

Life gets in the way. Professionals who once had staff to assist with all those things now find they have to do their admin (etc.) themselves and so their focus has become blurred as a result. But that doesn’t mean we can abandon the Focus at the expense of the mundane. It just means we have to manage our selves better.

Now, what tends to happen is that we do whatever arises as it arises – an e-mail pings, someone pops by, the phone rings – and we redirect our (very important) focus away in their direction.

Stop it. Stop it now – or at least as much as the Gods of customer service allow.

A thing that pings or rings or is passing(s) should be given only appropriate attention, not undivided, immediate attention if you are to maximise your productivity and effectiveness.

I suggest that you do a couple of things which might help you do that.

  1. Ignore emails, and plan to deal with them at a time which suits your responsibilities – maybe at the start of the day, immediately after lunch or last thins as part of tomorrow’s planning.
  2. Shut your office door if you can. People won’t interrupt if they can’t see you. Honest.
  3. Turn your smartphone off if you want uninterrupted time.
  4. Block time out for uninterrupted, focused thinking/doing time in your planning system Or, put another way, make an appointment with yourself and keep it inviolable.

While Covey and his associated training company never again seemed to refer to the Circle of Focus after the 1994 publication of First Things First’ I find that the concept of the Circle of Focus (like the short chapter on The Three Resolutions in ‘Principle Centred Leadership’) is one of the most profound time management concepts I’ve ever known.

Try it at work, if possible.

Set time aside for the most important stuff, the stuff which, if focused upon 100%, will provide the maximum bang for buck you can achieve.

Then try this at home……………………

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook

Like this:

Like Loading...

Read three lines, then act accordingly.

22 Friday Nov 2019

Posted by threeresolutionsguy in Discipline, Time Management, Uncategorized

≈ Comments Off on Read three lines, then act accordingly.

Tags

"time management", effectiveness, interruptions

If this post just popped up in some kind of inbox and you were alerted to it, let me suggest that you open the tab and then go back to what you were doing. Read it later, when you have a clear, spare two minutes.

Can you imagine if other people did that? Allowed YOU to decide when to be interrupted?

I have noticed that people are now imitating mobile phones. (Eh?*) When a phone rings, we answer it without thought. We have adapted to the urgency implied by the self-selected, jolly amusing ringtone and, even if we are engaged with someone else, will usually interrupt ourselves and answer it.

Unconsciously, people have now adopted the belief that they are smartphones, and I bet you have experienced the situation where you are chatting to a colleague and someone interrupts – and the conversation sways that way instead of where it was. Absolutely unbelievable and incredibly RUDE.

A wise man speaking as I did a spin session said, “An interruption is something that happens when someone thinks you care.” I like that. It’s a little blunt and it doesn’t apply to all interruptions, of course – but it is funny.

Interruptions – unwelcome interruptions – are those events that interfere in an untimely way with what we are doing that is more important. If an event intercedes with what we’re already engaged in, but the new event is more important, it is NOT an interruption – it is a new priority until it is effectively dealt with, even if that only means arranging the response for a later, better time.

That’s why a firefighter isn’t ‘interrupted’ by a fire alarm – that is their job and their greater priority. And given the aforementioned definition, they care.

But a lot of ‘interruptions’ are lesser priorities, and we need to (a) manage ourselves to have the discipline to negate their impact and (b) teach other smartphone-people that their urgency is not necessarily ours. (In fact, we often need to teach people that their urgency is their fault, but each occurrence has its own characteristics and we can’t generalise. Some such interruptions need our input.)

The proper response to a needless interruption is – “I’m sorry, I can’t deal with that now*, come back at/email me about it.”

I was once asked by a manager how he could prevent unnecessary interruptions. I asked him if he, like many managers in the organisation, routinely left his office door open. He replied that he did.

“Close it when you’re busy,” I suggested. He later provided feedback to the effect that shutting his door when busy was the most effective time-saver he’d ever used.

The key to managing interruptions is to know what your priorities are, plan your time to maximise the impact you have on those priorities, and manage everything else around that plan.

And ensure you communicate that system to those around you. If they know how you manage, they can adapt their needs (priorities, plan, execution) around yours, too. And little fleas have smaller fleas, as they say – the systematic approach to work, properly communicated, cascades downhill until only those interruptions that matter come to your attention.

Which in itself frees up enough of your time to make reading this article the best use of your time – and the best thing you have learned – today.

You’re welcome.

 

*American readers – ‘Eh?’ ‘now’ is UK English for ‘Wait, what?’ and ‘now’ is UK English for ‘Right now’. I am bi-lingual.

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook

Like this:

Like Loading...

Mini-Blog 4 – Telephonicus Interruptus

15 Wednesday Oct 2014

Posted by threeresolutionsguy in Rants

≈ Comments Off on Mini-Blog 4 – Telephonicus Interruptus

Tags

conversation, interruptions, mobile phone, rude, smartphone, telephone

People have become telephones.

You’ve all, I’m sure, had that experience when you’re in a meeting or engaged in a conversation with another person, and a phone rings. Without question, the party whose phone it is will respond, occasionally by picking it up and hanging up straight away but more often than not they will answer it. Since the event of the mobile phone, particularly the smartphone, this occurs more often as we don’t have to be in a formal environment to experience this phenomenon any more. It happens everywhere. In addition, we expect someone to answer a phone immediately we call, because we would do the same.

It’s Pavlov’s Dog for the 21st Century. What is funnier is that if someone in a group takes out their phone, it is 90% certain that the others in the group will check theirs.

Now it might just be me, but here’s what I’ve noticed. If I am in a conversation with somebody, it’s now common for someone to walk up to us with the intent of speaking to one of us and then just interrupt. And, strange as this is, whoever they seek to speak to will immediately disengage from their original contact and start talking to the newcomer. It happened to me last week, it was always happening at work. And what is really odd is that, even knowing this, if someone interrupts my conversation with another to speak to me, I am just as likely to turn away from my original chat to engage with the interrupter.

Is that your experience? Have people become so accustomed to the immediacy of the mobile ‘get me anywhere’ telephone that now people have to be answered immediately, too? Are we so familiar with the phone’s impersonal and intangibly reasonable ability to interrupt without being judged that we think we can do the same and interrupt people in person? Why isn’t this seen as incredibly RUDE?

At least the telephone has the manners to ask first.

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook

Like this:

Like Loading...

Archives

best blogs

Blogroll

  • Blogtopsites

Blog Stats

  • 17,868 hits

Categories

  • Character and Competence
  • Discipline
  • General
  • Purpose and Service
  • Rants
  • Time Management
  • Uncategorized

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.com

Blog at WordPress.com.

  • Follow Following
    • THE THREE RESOLUTIONS
    • Join 148 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • THE THREE RESOLUTIONS
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
%d bloggers like this: