Are "urgent" requests derailing your day?
Photo by Christina Morillo from Pexels
Today we’ve got a guest post from Emily Roner over at Prialto. Thanks, Emily!
You might love planning, but sticking to the plan? That can be extremely challenging. From stressed coworkers who treat every issue as a major fire to kids who need constant IT support for their online classes, there’s an often endless number of urgent requests that pull your attention away from your top priorities.
To stay on track for your goals, you need to sort through all of the noise, quickly determine which requests are actually time-sensitive (instead of just seeming that way), and adopt some sort of system that helps you tackle your planned and unexpected activities each day.
In my experience, here are some strategies that can help!
Set Expectations About What’s Urgent
The first step in preventing urgent tasks from derailing your productivity is setting mutual expectations with your family and colleagues. Urgency can be very subjective, and the tone that people use to describe requests can also make tasks seem more or less time-sensitive than they actually are.
This is a common issue with kids who are doing online school. They’ll frantically interrupt you to ask for help with every issue they encounter, as it comes up, regardless of the urgency. To limit the interruptions, chat with them about what kinds of problems need to be addressed immediately and which ones can wait until you have a break.
Help them understand by giving them a few examples that relate to their own time. How would they feel if you were to interrupt their video games asking them a question about what they they want to breakfast tomorrow, vs. asking them to watch their younger sibling for a minute while you deal with an overflowing sink?
Give them a framework of the types of requests that they can interrupt you for, vs. those that can wait:
Urgent: Their class starts in 5 minutes, and their computer isn’t working. In cases like this, they should ask for immediate help.
Non-urgent: They need help with an assignment that’s not due for a couple more days. They can wait to ask for help until the next time you check in on them.
You can also set similar expectations with your team by staying aligned on deadlines and your top priorities. Define together what “an emergency” means, and which communication channels will be used to contact each other when you need something right away. This gives everyone a better understanding of what requests need to be addressed immediately and which ones you can tackle at a more convenient time.
Choose 1 - 3 “Must Do” Tasks Each Day
Urgent requests often don’t derail your productivity because they’re time-consuming but because they make it easy to abandon the original project you were working on in favor of a bunch of other smaller tasks.
Many of the most common urgent tasks (questions from kids and coworkers, unexpected phone calls, small edit requests, etc.) take less than 10 minutes to handle. If you were able to address the issue and then immediately dive back into your work without missing a beat, the interruptions would have minimal impact.
The challenge is that it actually takes us much longer to refocus after an interruption (23 minutes, on average!) and in addition, once your mind shifts focus, it’s easy to spot a dozen other related tasks that also seem essential.
Next thing you know, an hour or two has gone by, and you’re struggling to remember what you should be working on.
A simple strategy to stay focused is to choose one to three priorities, things that absolutely must get done today, and put them front and center. Every time you finish an urgent request, come back to the list. If you find yourself forgetting to look at the list, you can also set hourly reminders on your phone so that your attention is constantly brought back to your key projects.
Momentum (a Chrome extension) is another great tool for this. Enter your focus for the day into the field in the center, and then every time you open a new browser tab, you’ll be reminded of what you were supposed to be working on!
Block Time for Meetings, Project Work and “New Requests”
While you have to deal with some urgent requests immediately (like your kids getting into potentially harmful situations or a call from your boss), most tasks can wait until you reach a productive breaking point. (It may not feel like it, but it’s generally true.)
To take greater control of your day, divide your schedule into the longest possible blocks you can go without responding to your typical requests. This could be a half-hour or two hours; the specific amount of time matters far less than your ability to dedicate the blocks to specific activities that drive your success. During these times, mute all notifications and let your household members know that you’ll be heads down and not available. Update your Slack away message accordingly too!
In between each work block, create a gap for you to address new, incoming requests:
Here’s an example of what a day could look like :
8 AM to 9 AM - Team Meeting
9 AM to 9:30 AM - Process New Requests
9:30 AM to 11 AM - Project Work
11 AM to 11:30 AM - Process New Requests
11:30 AM to 12:00 PM - Lunch
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM - Client Meeting
1:30 PM to 2 PM - Internal Meeting
2 PM to 3 PM - New Requests
3 PM to 5 PM - Project Work
Pro-Tip: Think of email and Slack as part of the “new request” time. Batch process those messages!
If your busyness fluctuates throughout the day based on your kids’ and colleagues’ typical schedules, vary the amount of time you dedicate to project work and new requests to reflect that. If ever you have a light day for new requests, use the time to take breaks or get ahead on other projects.
Try this strategy and see if it works for you, to allow for a bit more uninterrupted time through the day.