Taking Out The Clutter
Posted in Career Building
The benefits that one gets whenever he or she cleans out the closets at home is quite tangible. You feel clean, organized and are inspired to stick to your game plan of keeping your room tidy and clean. The same goes for your career. It helps to be able to take away the different activities and time wasters in your career. The more distracting things that you remove from your every day office life, the more you will be productive in your job.
One of the main things that you could try taking out is the different distractions that you have in your job. You could start by identifying the different tasks that you can take out of your everyday life. What this does is it frees up one's time, energy, brain power and it essentially enables you to experience better performance in work. This enables you to enjoy work more often and will thus improve one's performance. You should be able to define what your number 1 priority is and you could start from there.
One of the action steps that you could try is to clearly define your goals. It should be clear to you what you want to be in the coming years. It is also important that you work towards this goal by doing only the things that you need in order to be able to get to this point. The tasks that you do should be relevant to the goals and personal aspirations that you have set for yourself.
After setting these personal aspirations, try to set annual objectives that will enable you to keep track of your goal and be sure to create an outline for your personal goal. If you are currently dong tasks which do not directly support your goals, you can try talking to your supervisor about how to delegate them or how to slowly transition out of that role.
Another thing that one needs to eventually do is to declutter their email inbox. Too often people have unnecessary email that may not be relevant to their tasks. An inbox might be full of newsletters, mailings and listserves. If these particular email messages are not helpful to you and your career, then you should end up unsubscribing from them.
For those messages which are not as urgent you may essentially reply with a canned messaged such as, "Thanks for your message. I'll get back to you as soon as I can." After that you may transfer those types of messages to a folder which may be captioned as "Unread" so that you may be able to go back for them and reply to them properly.
The email that you receive should be email that is significant and absolutely relevant to your job, your career and your urgent professional interests. If any email of your falls away from these categories then they should be eliminated, deleted or unsubscribed from.
The earlier that one declutters his or her inbox and revises the way it is organized, the better one's correspondence will be with people from the office. The pay off is that you will be able to properly organize yourself as well as your professional tasks.
