I’ve been on a real productivity kick recently. At work more and more tasks have been coming my way. I’ve now been in my job long enough where I feel comfortable telling my boss that I have too much on my plate right now and could he send something to another consultant this one time? The problem is, that response to a request from him doesn’t sit well with me. I know I should be getting more accomplished. To that end, I did a little internet research on time management techniques and the like. I ended up purchasing David Allen’s Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress Free Productivity and currently am approximately a quarter of the way through it.
Of course, the internet is buzzing with people geeking out over this book and its techniques. Lifehacker.com, Lifehack.org, among a plethora of others. I also know a few people in and around my office that have started implementing some of the Getting Things Done (GTD) principles into their work. I’ve seen a benefit to my peace of mind at work already by using the GTD principles and keeping a frequently reviewed listing of my “open loops.” This large recepticle of tasks allows me to work easy knowing that I am not in fact forgetting anything. The productivity increases I’ve noticed have been tangible.
Then along comes Friday afternoons. I know I have lots to be doing, my task list of “open loops” tells me so. I just struggle to actually get anything done from 12:30PM to 5:00PM on Fridays. Part of my problem is that I work “backup” on Friday afternoons at work - a position that exists to help run the day to day operations of the Help Desk and help the Student employees with any technical questions they can’t answer themselves. Undergraduate student employees on Friday afternoon can think of only one thing: that night’s festivities.
This invariably leads to me being distracted all Friday afternoon as I listen to the student consultants get more and more wound up (those of you who used to work at the Help Desk know exactly of what I speak). I’m wracking my mind for ways to convert the four and a half hours I am on backup every Friday afternoon from a dreaded productivity vacuum to a satisfying end of the week wrap up of which I can be proud and feel good. So far I’ve got nothing.
Do any of the rest of you out there find it hard to focus on Friday afternoons for any reason? Do you give in or have you found some method to maintain your focus?
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I probably have a less structured job than you do, so I have lots of mobility with my schedule. So, I like to save all busy/paper/procedural work for the afternoons, especially Fridays. The procedural work also lets me prepare for the next day.
Things like: checking the calendar for appointments, writing to-do lists for the next day, writings ‘things accomplished’ lists for the current day, etc. Another great thing for the winding-down hours is research. Sometimes this forays into political articles, but mostly IT and web dev stuff, so the time is definitely not wasted.
Hopefully this helps