Do you ever have a moment of clarity in the middle of answering a colleague’s question while checking your schedule when you have a client on hold and you are waiting for your flight information to load on the computer … that you are just like Wile E. Coyote? If you don’t, you should!
I don’t know how many times I saw that hungry, hungry coyote buried under a pile of rubble, while Road Runner meeped by. A bony brown arm would stick out, flailing helplessly – sort of like your hand, sticking out from its metaphorical rubble-pile of miscellaneous junk that all seems non-negotiable at the time. If you can’t identify exactly what that rubble is (Quartz? Silicate? Is it volcanic? Maybe Dr Who knows?), Jane Alexander probably can!
‘The Overload Solution’ is a time-saving book full of common sense, every-day strategies for dealing with the pressures on your time that seem to suck away at your day. There isn’t one magical tip that will work for everybody, and there is probably nothing in the book that you haven’t heard before. But Jane Alexander’s tonal combination of nagging mother, trumpeting elephant and flower-laden hippy just does it for me! Ooooo, yeah (cue Barry White music)… !!
The elephant in this book doesn’t just trumpet from a soapbox about the perils of modern life. It gets down and rolls in the mud, too. Here are some quick time-solutions (work-related) from the book:
Time Stealers
- Phone – set aside periods of the day where you don’t take calls, including on the mobile. Use voicemail if you don’t have the luxury of a secretary 🙂
- Email – leave your email program closed or disable the alerts, rather than competing with your curiosity when you hear ‘ba-bong’ from your computer speaker. Set a time limit for responding to emails and keep them work-related.
- Meetings – With so many different viewpoints, it is easy to get sidetracked. The first questions to ask are ‘Do we even need to be having a meeting?’, and ‘Do I need to be here?’. After that, appoint a meeting administrator to keep participants focused.
Here are some of Alexander’s most useful ‘band-aid’ fixes for an overloaded life:
- Keep your mobile habitually turned off. If there are people who should be able to contact you no matter where you are (child care, schools or a particular client), have a different mobile for that purpose.
- Unplug the TV rather than simply turning it off.
- Limit both caffeine and alcohol to special occasions
- Use the internet only for specific purposes, and stay focused while searching
- Cancel your newspaper subscriptions – and also your email newsletter subscriptions. Go looking for the information if you want it.
- Separate home and work. It should be a rare day that you need to take work home because eight hours wasn’t enough to finish it in.
Alexander goes through some of the most basic reasons that you have no time to start with- and if you can put your preconceptions of what life should be like away in a New Folder on your desktop, also helps you overcome them. Some of these reasons include:
- Information
We can access so much information so quickly, and so much of it is conflicting nowadays. You only have to search for the best price for any given product on the internet to know how information can be a burden rather than a freedom
- Search for status
The need to have the best and newest of various things drives us to work longer than strictly necessary
- Perfection
Not just regarding possessions, but the quest for a perfect body, the perfect job, perfect children that have 140 point IQs and are soccer team captains, and the perfect partner.
These life tips will definitely require some re-organization of your ideals and values. At the very least, you’ll have to re-organize your day to read the book 😉 . For my money though … a time-saving book that is well worth the $6 or so that Amazon will charge you for it.
