The alternative to getting organised in a fast paced market like recession is to face eventual meltdown. It is more important than ever to clear up your workload and get on top of what you do every day.

First divide your tasks in to urgent and important. You must make time every day for important tasks or else they eventually become urgent and when every task is urgent you are in a ‘fire fighting’ situation which isn’t sustainable long term.  The important things have a nasty habit of sitting around quietly and then exploding. It’s also very stressful which you don’t need in a downturn.

See if this scenario is familiar and then try to spot possible remedies:

Roger has a major proposal pending but he also has two weeks to finish it, at the same time there are several matters that demand his urgent attention: A member of staff is very unhappy and they want to talk to him today about it. Senior management need his weekly and monthly reports and have asked for additional information, the deadline he’s been given is, ‘Now’. A client has been calling all morning and Roger doesn’t know what for, on top of that it’s Monday morning and he has over 500 emails in his in-box, he’s skimmed through most of them but needs to go through them again. Most seem to be FYI (For your information). What Roger really wants to do is spend some time thinking about how he’s going to respond to some worrying downward trends in the industry. On top of all this he can’t seem to find his RFP (request for proposal) from his major client...

In this scenario lack of priorities or disorganisation will sink poor old Roger. There are however some things that will help. First he needs  to prioritise properly, a deadline of, ‘now’ is nonsense, Roger should negotiate it with managers and get a realistic deadline.

Staff may be about to leave or just feeling the need for reassurance, Roger first needs determine the real priority status and then give the member of staff a time to meet that suits both and is realistic. Scheduling time for important tasks means that they get done. Making the diary the heart of his working day will help Roger to start working proactively rather than reactively.

Hopefully Roger’s reports have been prepared or at least the information gathered and analysed before the deadline is due. He needs to be organised about getting them done at the best time, preferably as data come in so that he doesn’t have to go back and re-read it all later for reporting. He could also look at who else it could be delegated to, this takes time in the short term but could lead to long term benefits.

He really needs to try to read emails as close as possible to once only. File important ones for further action but don’t read everything and then leave them where they’ll have to re-read later. Roger has to cut down on ‘FYI’ emails, they are a way to cover people’s backs and they waste huge amounts of time. He should insist on being sent information not data, the difference is that data is raw numbers or facts that need to be analysed whereas information has a purpose that is relevant to you. He needs a good sift through his inbox to get rid of rubbish that regularly blocks the important stuff.
 

Out of all the issues on the desk that day for Roger the urgent ones are the client who needs to talk to him and possibly the member of staff. The important issues are the proposal and drawing up a strategy to deal with the downturn. Everything else needs a relevant time slot in the diary. Once it’s all scheduled he will be on top of it again and ready to face tomorrows raft of impossibly urgent tasks.
 

A final word of caution to Roger, if he doesn’t have really good systems to find his work in a recession he’s likely to face severe stress and may not even make it to tomorrow. Clean up those systems.

Tips

Clean up! It’s cathartic and gives your brain a rest from the stress of worrying where things are and what’s about to grab you unawares.

Negotiate deadlines where you can, don’t say yes to everyone (but be careful not to say no).

Clean up that in-box; stem the tide of rubbish at the source wherever you can. If you have 12 months worth of unread business school newsletters in your inbox, is it time to unsubscribe?

Be tough with vandals who fill up your time with nonsense deadlines, bits of irrelevant data or clutter your in-box with FYI’s.
Are you the best person to do this task, can you delegate up down or sideways?
Are there short cuts you can use; proposals that you can use as a template,
 

And always, stick to the deadlines you give, you won’t get a second chance if you miss a deadline that you have negotiated.