Beat the Clock

E-mails, faxes, phone calls, oh my. Here's how to get it all done

Pete McArthur

By Toddi Gutner

You arrive at your office at 9 a.m., flip on your computer, and instead of writing an overdue client proposal as you'd planned, you start answering e-mails. The phone rings, and then your sales chief knocks on your door looking for help with a personnel issue. You check the clock as she leaves your office: Noon. The client proposal is still only in your head, and you have a lunch in 15 minutes. How, you wonder, does anyone — or does anyone? — get everything finished?

With so many competing demands on your time, you likely spend most days doing battle with the clock. "Few people have a system to deal with the increase in variety and velocity of information," says Dan Markovitz, president of productivity consulting firm TimeBack Management in Corte Madera, Calif. The to-do lists you scribble won't help much, says Markovitz, because they don't rank tasks in order of priority. You may think you're getting it under control by becoming a master multitasker, but that habit actually may hinder your progress. It can take up to 50% more time to complete tasks when you switch between them than to complete one thing at a time, according to a study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology.

Thankfully, there are ways to tame the beast. Managing your time comes down to organizing and planning, including figuring out how you will handle those inevitable, pesky interruptions. Start by getting your desk and office in order—for good. Next, identify the different roles you play at work and the tasks they involve—information that will make it possible to plan your day realistically. The effort is worth it, says Elaine Brodsky, co-founder and president of Citistorage, a $25 million archival storage and record retrieval company in Brooklyn, N.Y. "I used to do a bunch of things at once, but had trouble paying attention to anything," says Brodsky. "Even though it was really difficult, I've cleaned off my desk, gotten rid of my Post-its, and bunched tasks together like returning all my phone calls and e-mails at one time."

DISCARD, DELEGATE, DO...

Productivity experts offer a strategy for the clutter addicts that seek their help: the D system. It's a series of steps to prioritize your tasks, says Laura Stack, president of Productivity Pro, a consulting firm in Highlands Ranch, Colo., specializing in productivity improvement. Stack suggests that every document and e-mail you receive should be discarded, delegated, done, dated (when you will do it), drawered (immediately filed), or deterred (from returning to you again and again). The goal is to handle each piece of paper or e-mail only once. "Be more decisive and stop shuffling paper," says Stack.

Rob Huber Jr., president of AchieveInternet, needs to be organized to manage his $3 million Web site development company, which has 30 employees in offices in New York and San Diego. To conquer the inflow of paper, Huber has created a filing system that has folders for people, including employees and clients, and topics related to the business. His project management files are divided into current work and completed work; accounting files are subdivided into invoices and bills. To handle e-mail, Huber has created digital files that match the paper ones. And he makes sure to purge the excess regularly. "Every other week, I clean out my e-mail and bring my in-box down to less than 10 messages," he says.

Just make sure your system is easy enough to follow. Paul Finkel, president of WEA Consulting, a $2 million, 13-employee human resources consulting company in San Rafael, Calif., used to rely on a calendar, a PDA, and a notebook to keep track of his daily tasks. But making sure his tools were synchronized was a waste of time. Now Finkel keeps his schedule only on a PDA.

Once you can see your desk again, you need to figure out just where your time is going. "Time estimating is the No.1 gateway to time management," says Julie Morgenstern, president of Julie Morgenstern Enterprises, a corporate productivity consultant in New York.