Being timely goes hand in hand with being efficient. There’s a certain importance to knowing how to have effective urgency without making everything a fire and being able to prioritize. From a technical standpoint, you should be punctual to be efficient. Being proactive and conscientious of response times can prevent something from becoming an emergency at the last minute. Your lack of preparedness does not qualify as an emergency for someone else, as the old saying goes. Don’t let the things you need to complete slip through your fingers to the point of panic.
Here are a few pointers on how to be more productive and not miss out on those important items.
- Use a to-do list that you consistently look at and interact with. Something like one of the following
It doesn’t matter what you use, as long as you hit what you need to.- Trello, which allows you to create lists and line items with different statuses, details, due dates and automatic alerting
- Google Keep, a simple note taking app that has the ability to do simple checklists with reminders.
- Microsoft To-Do, a simple to do list with reminders and check boxes
- Utilize a service like SaneBox or Clean.email to help organize email. You can also set up custom filters to help you keep some of those pesky emails at bay.
- If you’re not able to answer an email right away, snooze it until you can. Snooze will allow it to hide until the time you set, then it comes back in. See this guide for Outlook. . you want to postpone the message or this for Gmail.
- If you have a lot of email junk and you use Gmail, you can use this guide to automatically unsubscribe, or reach out to us and we can set it up for you!
- Utilize the smart inbox features of Gmail and Outlook to help keep your eye on those that are important. I also like Cloze.com to help manage the inbox and contacts.
Feeling stuck like you have too much to do? We’re here for you. We want to be your personal concierge to take something off your plate. Reach on out and see how we can help!
