Saving time at work
Limit the time spent on emails
Choose a time of day to dedicate to emails. Instead of being disturbed every five minutes by the Outlook message alert, open your e-mail only in the morning, when you arrive at the office, and dedicate yourself to e-mails for half an hour. Then, close your email. Do not reopen it more than once or twice a day.
Unplug the phone
Focusing on a practice is difficult when the phone doesn't stop ringing. If you want to be quiet, turn on the answering machine. If you don't have an answering machine, arrange with a colleague: she can answer the phone and take the messages in the morning and you will do the same for her in the afternoon. Once you have finished the most urgent work, take a look at your messages and, if necessary, call back whoever was looking for you.
Plan your breaks
Once again, Cristina swooped into your office, coffee in hand, to tell you what she saw on television last night. The problem is that you still have 12 files to finish, a presentation to prepare and a client to meet today. You can't let your office become the coffee break meeting point for all the chatty colleagues you find. To rest assured, ask your colleagues to call you before passing by or, better still, to send you an email. Or decide with them a time to meet everyone at the coffee machine.
Expect
Avoid working in a hurry as much as possible. Most of the time, the deadlines for practices are long-term. Instead of putting it a week before the deadline, start dealing with a practice 6 weeks in advance, dedicating an hour or two a day to it. This will allow you to avoid nasty surprises at the last minute.
Make a hierarchical list of your commitments
In professional jargon we speak of "to do list": it is the list of things you have to do. Instead of keeping everything in mind, your schedule, put it down on paper. Write down everything you need to do, from the most urgent and important things to undemanding and trivial details. Organize everything hierarchically, underlining the most urgent things, and deleting them as you do them. In this way you can better manage the organization of your commitments and avoid forgetting some of them.
Save some time for the unexpected
If you always work in a hurry, there is no time in your day for an extra practice or an unscheduled meeting. Unfortunately, at work, things never go as you thought and there is often an unexpected situation that happens between your head and neck. And then, the panic. Avoid stress by keeping a moment out of the day to dedicate to the unexpected.
