What Not To Do

Between the two of us, we have 400-500 years of management experience. (When you work middle manage management in health care you do the work of 3 or 4 people at a time.) One way we survived is organization and making the most of every hour at work. That’s not with a strict schedule of what to expect and sticking to a to-do list. It’s formulating and implementing a to-don’t list. Yes, the secret to doing efficiently and effectively is knowing what not to do. 

• Don’t fill every hour of every day. You must leave time open for unexpected tasks, urgent or emergent needs, and often just to recenter yourself for the onslaught of the next hour.
  

• Prioritize but don’t abandon. Almost all management guides encourage people to deal with what’s most important, critical, or needed first, and allow other tasks and requests to fall to later in the day. Good advice, but when later in the day comes along, remember those less important, critical, or needed items are now the more important ones. They deserve your attention now that you have dealt with the other critical needs of the day.
  

• Don’t tie yourself to your desk or workplace. Get up and move. Even just a few minutes every hour will do great things for your aching muscles and stiff joints. When you feel better, you will work better. Along those same lines…
  

• Don’t stay in one place. When you get up and move, go exploring! If you work outside the home, visit other departments, see how others use your products or services, find out what others are working on and what their priorities are. If you work at home, leave your designated workspace and walk through your home, taking in what the time at your workplace has allowed you to accomplish. At either location, go outside, breathe in the fresh air and visit with nature.
  

• Don’t work only on what interests you. Allow yourself to grow and find places where you can improve or can make yourself more complete.
  

• Don’t give up. You don’t have to finish everything on your to do list today. Some things take more time, more effort, more energy than one day has. Allow yourself to step back and regroup but then don’t forget to start again.
  

• Don’t forget to say please and thank you. Good manners never go out of style. Everybody becomes more engaged, more productive, and more fun to be around when they feel valued, and they feel most valued when they are treated like people.

Now that you know what not to do, there are no excuses for not doing!