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Are Your Priorities In Order? It’s Time To Find Out.

May 25, 2021

Team Management, Monitoring Teams, Workplace Culture

We all like to think that we’ve got our priorities in order, but even the most organised planner in us can sometimes get lost in tasks that maybe aren’t at the top of our lists. It happens to the best of us, and that’s fine, but sometimes we don’t even realise it’s happening. 

It’s only when someone asks us what we’ve been up to that week or where we’re up to on a certain project that we start to realise that we’re maybe spending too much time on the wrong things. With Wundamail, this becomes apparent quickly. If day after day your status updates consist of the same tasks or little niggly things that need to be done but don’t add value, it’s going to be instantly noticeable, not only by you, but by everyone else in your team.

Admin

For one, admin can be an absolute killer of productivity. We know we have to do it and often we keep putting it off, so it snowballs into a giant task. Clearing out a neglected email inbox can easily take half a day or more if you’re not careful and all of a sudden, you haven’t done anything that adds value. It’s a necessary evil, but does it require such a valuable block of time?

Instead, ask yourself how many of these emails are necessary. We all sign up to odd bits and pieces for demos, for free resources, for events and after these things have passed we still get all the marketing spam that comes with it. Suddenly, we come into 30 or 40 emails a day and the majority of them we don’t care about. The trouble is, we have to read and check through all the subject lines in case we delete something important. So, unsubscribe, save yourself the hassle in the long run and use that time in a more productive way.

Communication

Another necessary evil that can eat up a lot of your time without you realising is communication. Stay with us here, communication is important, we all know that, but your method of communication can be consuming your day. 

If you’re having back to back meetings most days, then you’re not using your time effectively. How many of those meetings were necessary? Block out chunks of time in your calendar to work on specific tasks and projects so that meetings don’t get organised all the time.

Especially if you’re a manager, this is vital. If you spend all your time explaining things to your team or micromanaging their days then you’re not adding any value and you’re actually distracting them from getting on with their day. Take a look at your Wundamail daily status updates and see if there are any common threads that you can learn from. 

Editing & Checking Work

If your job includes looking through other people’s work and increasingly you’re finding that this is taking up more and more of your day, maybe it’s time to have a chat with the original team member. A lot of the time we look at something that isn’t quite right and just fix it ourselves because it’s quicker than explaining it and shuttling the piece of work back and forth, but this way people don’t learn. 

Fast forward a couple of months down the line and you’re still fixing the same mistakes, but all those individual occasions have added up - it’s not quicker to just fix it yourself - you have to explain why you’re changing what you’re changing so that it doesn’t keep happening and you can get back on with your own projects.

It can be difficult to see when you’re spending a lot of time on certain aspects of your job that might not be priorities. By using a daily status update software, like Wundamail, it’s easy to identify how you’re using your time, and whether or not you’re using it wisely. Once you spot this inefficiency you can take steps to change it, creating a more productive environment not only for yourself but for the team as a whole. Sounds good, right? Get your priorities in order with a 14 day free trial on us...

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