How To Tackle Minor Stoppages To Take Back Your Day
This video will show you how to take back your day, using one easy tool.
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Transcript from the Video
Welcome to the video. My name is Adriana Girdler and I am President and Chief Efficiency Officer of CornerStone Dynamics. I’m here today to teach you how to take back your day with one very simple quick tip that you can actually take away after watching this video. Taking back your day is something that I come across all the time from my clients – about how can we be more productive, I want to have at least some control over what we are going to do and how I’m going to do it. So I’m here to show you just exactly, with this simple technique, what you can do.
That being said, before I go into how to do this, I need to share with you a very important stat. It is all about minor stoppages. What are minor stoppages you’re wondering? That is when, in your activities for the day, you are constantly interrupted…it could be 30 seconds here, 5 minutes there but they really add up. In the world of manufacturing they’re really aware of minor stoppages because it has a big impact on their bottom line but in the business world, in the office sectors, probably not so much. When I actually write on the board and show you some things, you will be quite surprised at the power of minor stoppages and I don’t mean in a positive way.
I want to read you this stat. This is according to a Microsoft study and reported in The New York Times that workers took on average 15 minutes to return to a serious mental task, such as writing a report – put yourself back in that scenario, you are busy focused and then when they were dealing with an interruption (what we call minor stoppages), it took them at least 15 minutes to get back to that task because they had wandered off either checking other emails and responding back, surfing on the web or fixing up something before they actually got back to that task. That is a problem. I want to share with you why. I am just going to put this away – I am going to drop it and I am now going to get my lovely markers out because I really want to explain to you how and why this is such a problem.
Let’s really understand the work day – we have a work day from 8 am to 5 pm. So we have 9 hours for our work day. Great. Then why is it that we don’t feel like we are getting much done. Why is it we are doing work at home or on the weekends? There is something wrong here and this is what I want to show you.
We have to have lunch, let’s say 30 minutes. Well, that leaves us 8.5 hours. Still not bad, right? Well let’s take into account that you probably have 2 meetings a day. Some of you are probably going – “that is not realistic, I have meetings all day”, but that is another completely different video. Let’s say you have 2 meetings per day and they are 1 hour each. I realize it is going to increase or decrease but this is just an average that we are going to work with for this particular point that I am trying to make. So you have 2 meetings at 1 hour each – and what does that leave us? Well, it leaves us with 6.5 hours left to do work. Still not too bad, still gives us enough time, so why are we still not feeling like we have enough time in the day? Well, we have to have 2 coffee breaks. I don’t know about you but when I used to work for a major corporation, I needed my coffee first thing in the morning! So I definitely had that and definitely then there was that little lull in the afternoon so obviously I had my coffee break. And at that point, I am really being kind here – I am saying they are 15 minutes each – probably a little bit more than that if you think about all the chatting that you do, particularly in the morning with your first coffee – but we are going to say that they are 15 minutes each. So what does that give us…that gives us 6 hours left to play with. Well, with all this stuff, going to your lunch, going to the meetings, probably going to the washroom, probably going to get your print out that you sent to the printer which is probably at the other end of the hallway – we have to take into account your “walking around” time. So we have Walking around time. That is on average 1 hour. That is why weight loss companies always say, “Hey, put a pedometer on your foot and you will be amazed at how many steps you walk” – it is really to account for this (walking around time). So we have about 1 hour of walking around time. When you really think about it and if you want, please time yourself and you will be surprised that this is actually true. So what does that give us…that gives us 5 hours. Well, that’s a lot of time but we are still not using it the way we need to use it. This is where this stat comes into play. This is where the minor stoppages happen. If we have a 5 minute minor stoppage – that is someone calling us on the phone that we pick up, an email that we take a look at and decide to reply back to, or we want to surf the web, or someone comes by our desk, right, knocks on the door and says “hey, how are you doing? It has been a long time since I saw you, just wanted to say hi”. This is the minor stoppage that I am trying to talk about and trying to teach. Well if it is 5 minutes plus 15 minutes of return time in order to get back to the task that we were so diligently working at – guess what, that is 20 minutes of time that has been taken away from the things that we were just working on that needed our concentrated time. Reality states this…we probably have 2 of those per hour so we times this by 2 and that gives us 40 minutes per hour of minor stoppages. That gets scary because when you roll that over the 5 hours that you have left, and you have 40 minutes of that in minor stoppages…you know how much time you actually have left…(I am going to cover this with my back so you can’ t see it) …you have 1 hour and 40 minutes left in order to really focus on your task. This is why you are working at night and this is why you are working on the weekends because you are unable to really focus you attention at work. But I have a solution for you! Power Hours!! You can look at CornerStone Dynamic’s Power Hour Door Hanger, or you can write yourself a little note, you can take a piece of paper but it’s the power hour….I would like for you to book off time where you say to people “Please don’t interrupt me” and the beauty of it is that for our attention span, statistically we really only have an hour of full attention so having a power hour is perfect for that. It allows you to block off the time you need in order to do the work you need to get done. Now here is where the productivity part comes in. Even if you were to book 2 or 3 power hours in your day at specific sections of those days and actually follow through on it, you will be surprised at how much work you get done AT WORK and you start to take back your day. So that is my tip for you. Check out it out. Go to our website and you can actually see these Power Hours…they are pretty cool and they are already done for you so you may want to think about reaching out and checking it out on our site which I will have at the end of this video.
Have a fantastic day! May your day be taken back and remember, minor stoppages, they are a silent killer and here is one way to get rid of them.
