I have a million things to do today

Miss me? Well, that's something I suppose. The fact is that with organising our stand at Confex, working on our stand at Confex and then following up all the enquiries we got at Confex, this blog has taken a bit of a back seat for the last few weeks. To my loyal fans, I thank you for your patience. To everyone else - good morning.

And now to this week's blog

We all know the feeling. We get into the office a little bit early because we know that we have ‘a million things to do’ that day. So we write our list, put things in order of priority, assign a set amount of time to each task and then set to work.

And then the phone rings, and the whole plan goes splat.

Sound familiar? Of course it does, because we’ve all been there, but the fact is that our approach to the situation is invariably wrong. It all starts with the frame of mind that we bring into the office when we arrive. A million things to do? Hardly. Chances are that you have a lot of tasks to take care of and you already know that there is just no way that you’re going to finish them all before the day is through.

Except that you don’t know that. You can’t possibly know that because nobody can see into the future. The trouble is that you’ve created this mountain of work in your mind that you genuinely believe cannot be conquered, but it actually can.

Now this isn’t some motivational talk designed to tell you that ‘if you think you can, you will”, accompanied by a smile the size of Wales and jet fighters flying overhead shooting T Shirts at the crowd with a rockin’ sound track. Nope, this is just some bald guy telling you how his day is panning out.

I’ve got a lot of work today. I’m thrilled about that. Having nothing to do means that I am not only bored, but I am also not in a position to feed my family. What I don’t have however, is a mountain of work. What I have in front of me is a road – paved with tasks.

This road is long, but it is flat, smooth and straight and best of all, I can see the end of it. I pick up task number one – it’s the task that absolutely must be done right now. The task didn’t tell me when it needed doing – I decided that when I told the customer that I would have the information with him in the early part of this week. I didn’t say ‘Monday’, even though that would have made me look fantastic in the eyes of the client. I told them ‘early next week’ to allow for any distractions.

When I first thought about this task, I figured that it was going to take all day to get through. It didn’t. It took a few hours yesterday and then about half an hour on Tuesday morning. Forward thinking as I sometimes can be, I got into the office at 8.30 that morning, so by the time I was finished, my (and everyone else’s) working day had only just begun.

Then it was on to task two. This task required about 80% total focus, so whilst I will have made myself available to answer the phone, I didn't check my email until it was done. Now I was not expecting any urgent mails – but then, how can anyone expect something urgent? By its very definition, it is unexpected. None the less, if I’m worried that my clients don’t think I’m coming back to them immediately, I can always turn on an ‘out of office’ assistant and tell people that I am away from my email for the next hour and if the matter really cannot wait that long, that they should call me. Remember, I said that I was still answering the phone.

The moral of the story? Relax. You don’t have a million things to do today and what’s more, you don’t necessarily have to do everything on your To Do list today. What would happen if you took care of some of it tomorrow, or even asked someone else to help you take care of something?

Think about that for a moment before you move on to your next task. Your day will fly by and I promise you that you will feel productive at the end of it.