Hopefully you had a good Monday and here’s another fresh day for you to do some more meaningful work. Please take a couple of deep breaths … More oxygen helps your brain think better. Today, focus on “fillers”.
In a work day when you aren’t meeting your customers, your team folk, your boss or working on the product or service what do you do ? Often, if you aren’t a front line employee, you aren’t touching the work and you are supposed to get work done. If you have come through the ranks, then suddenly you have a lot of time because you aren’t turning the nuts or processing that claim. All that time goes into “fillers” – email, gossip, coffee breaks, friends calling in, making and remaking presentations, moving data between MS-Excel columns because one manager likes it one way and the other likes it another way and so on.
Take 5 minutes and list all the fillers in your work day and put an hour on your calendar when you get to them. Fill the rest of your calendar with work that positively impacts your stakeholders and get done in 8 hours or 8.5 hours. Fillers are like drugs – they make you feel important because they fill up your day and everyone says you are the busiest person in the office ! It leaves a warm glow in your heart and adds a layer of ice at home with your loved ones who don’t get time to spend with you ….
You work to live, not live to work and workaholism is escaping from life. Every extra minute spent on fillers is a minute wasted. So fill your work day with meaningful work.
Work to live.