How to reclaim hours by cutting out the biggest time sucks of your workday

There’s one scarce resource that nearly everyone wishes they had more of: time. It always seems like there are more things to do than hours in the day. Many ways to squeeze more productivity out of your workday may leave you feeling burned out. But there are ways to trim the time spent on many aspects of life that will leave you with at least a little more wiggle room.

Here are a few strategies:

Create a guide to reduce interruptions

If you often lose hours responding to emails and Slack messages asking different versions of the same questions, create an FAQ document with the answers all in one place. If you want to take it one step further, you can follow the lead of former Google vice president and Stripe COO Claire Hughes-Johnson, who created a “Working with Claire” guide.

It’s basically a reference manual to instruct people you work with. Fast Company writer Stephanie Vozza, explains: “In her guide, Hughes-Johnson sets expectations, such as how to share information with her, and the amount of time she needs to send a response. It also includes her preferences, styles, and approaches, as well as alternative sources for help when employees are in a pinch and can’t move forward.” 

Trim all your meetings by at least 10 minutes

Yes, many people think all meetings are a waste of time. And while some companies have taken the extreme approach of eliminating all recurring meetings, many meetings are necessary and help build and maintain relationships.

However, very few of us fully pay attention for the entire length of a meeting—especially remote meetings. In fact, LiveCareer found that 9% of people start losing focus in less than 10 minutes into a meeting, while 43% said they lasted 20 to 30 minutes. Only 4% of people said they stayed focused for an hour or more.

Knowing that attention (and therefore usefulness) drops off after 20 minutes, trim the meetings you have control over. Half-hour meetings become 20 minutes, hour-long meetings become 40 minutes, and by the end of the week you’ve reclaimed several hours.

Do it now or delegate it

To-do lists are a great productivity and organization tool, but we all waste a lot of time accumulating and then coming back to small tasks that end up eating up more time than they’re worth.

Vladislav Podolyako, founder and CEO of Folderly, uses what he calls the “Touch it Once” (TIO) principle. Here’s how it works for him: “If I can do a task in 10 minutes or less, I do it right away. If not, I either delegate it to someone else or set it aside for at least a week.”

Podolyako uses emails as a perfect example, explaining that many of the emails he receives require quick decisions. “If I’m just bcc-ed, usually my action is no action at all. If I know someone who knows an answer better, I forward [the] email.” He adds that he saves time by focusing on “being helpful instead of crafting a beautiful-looking but useless email.” 

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