I was speaking to someone recently who consults on getting your life back. I don’t mean from the brink of self-destruction, but from being absolutely and totally overwhelmed with the business of your day. Emails, phone calls, mail (yes the old fashioned kind), texts, twitter, blog feeds, news feeds, people walking in your door, beepers, instant messages, meeting reminders….. GAHHH – stop!
I find that often I see so much information that I know will provide me with great information, help me to build my knowledge around a certain topic (mainly HR and the various plethora of topics therein AND Social Media and marketing) and to help me understand what I should know. White papers, research papers, blogs, publications, eNewsletters, surveys, opinions and oh so much. How do you handle the onslaught of the information? Coming at me from so many different ways.
But there are ways to handle being overwhelmed –
1/ TweetDeck is great for handling the “noise and news” of Twitter.
2/ Getting a feed from the business wire services every morning to my selected topics of press releases.
3/ RSS feeds for all of my fav blogs.
4/ Google Alerts (of course)
5/ Closing out my inbox for 1 hour a day to try to focus on those jobs that need more than 2 minutes to do.
6/ Blocking off time in my calendar.
7/ Closing my door – tight!
8/ There must be more but I am too distracted to think of them (this blog took 4 days to write)
Every 6 months or so, HRmarketer.com organizes an event in the Boston area for C-level leaders of HCM providers, and it is hosted at various companies in the area. We bring in a presentation that will help this group of people to get better at their jobs – to make them better C-Levellers and leaders. Our next event on March 22nd will have speaker Paul Burton, author of “Surfing the Tsunami! Tips for Staying in Command of your Day”. He will come and spend 1 ½ hours with the group and help them to 1/ Distinguish between activity and productivity and focusing on productive behaviors. 2/ Increasing high-touch activities rather than hard touch activities. 3/ Learning effective ways to guide people versus direct them.
Help me ride that Tsunami Paul - I am going to be listening.
I know I am not standing on this island all alone on this one – there are many of you out there – I have seen you - the ones with the crazed, frazzled looks on their faces. You are out there.