Young Gen’Y Entrepreneur, Digital Native is constantly connected, in search of all the trends and innovation, sprinkled with fear of “missing out” or “missing from the news of the day”! More than that, it is a real discipline, a sport or brain gymnastics…
and you? In the face of all the constant excitement of this digital and ultra-connected era, how do you reconcile your work time and your leisure time!?
Stimulants that strongly disturb our concentration: SMS, Email, RSS, Spam, MMS, FB notification, Google Reminders, Tweets and RT etc. We save time in efficiency, to achieve the better comfort of life, very quickly presenting ourselves as a source of suffering, anxiety and finally despair…
Main culprit: Email!
did you know? The Barometer of Digital Usage and Disconnection, conducted by Meloop, a start-up specializing in benchmarking and improving digital practices, gives the following statistics:
- 30 emails received against an average of 11 emails sent per day
- 63 is the number of emails that leaders receive on an average per day
- 84% of emails are internal to the organization. 27% of them are never read
- 54% of email responses are sent within an hour
- 75% of employees have no automatic sorting rules set up
- 23% of emails are sent outside the so-called “normal” hours in the mornings, evenings and weekends
- 3.6 gigabytes is the average amount of data stored in mailboxes in the cloud
The inability to manage and follow this constant flow of information can easily worry entrepreneurs, if we do not manage it with intelligence, discipline (yes, you hear it right from a young Y), But also creativity. Time was becoming such a precious commodity that it should be managed calmly, with relevance and intelligence.
here are some tips:
1. Stop Multitasking, Make way for Concentration!
Skilled in multitasking: walking down the street while reading email, reading email during financial meeting, reading text message during appointment (not great for the person I am on the receiving end)! Multitasking may sound efficient, but it can actually be the enemy of productivity and a source of stress and many frustrations.
There is a time for everything and for everything: a time to reflect, a time to plan, a time to act… According to Earl Miller, a renowned American neurologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), our brain is typically programmed not to do only one thing at a time. New technologies, the source of hyperstimulation, daily undermine our concentration on our priority tasks and missions. Turn off multitasking for better productivity and efficiency! Please note, this does not mean that you cannot manage projects in parallel and concurrently.
2. Take time to analyze, to assimilate better and to plan for better realization
According to Dominic Wolton, director of the CNRS Institute of Communication Sciences, “Accessible information has become an atrocity. We now have the impression that all decisions must be made within a quarter of an hour. Like politics in business, we always Atoms are on the edge of the abyss. There is a kind of dramatization of an emergency, which is extremely dangerous.” This situation is also found with entrepreneur and yet rules are necessary to manage this continuous flow of information. Why not use David Allen’s famous GTD rule. It categorizes and sorts emails according to the degree of priority.
In the life of any creator and entrepreneur, we follow 3 major steps: reflection and analysis, planning of objectives and actions to achieve them and finally action in operation.
The first step is one that is greatly influenced by the success of new technologies today. However, this input step is necessary, so that the following steps can be completed more quickly and efficiently. And if it is necessary to disconnect everything (PC, SMS, Mail etc…) during this input step, do it! It is a question of accepting the time “lost”, saving time and efficiency in analyzing and assimilating information and then realizing the planned tasks.
With regard to lengthy tasks and missions, take the time to plan them and write down your objectives and sub-objectives in a retroplanning. To help you in your organization, SaaS Mode has great collaborative forums. I’m thinking of Podio, Basecamp or even Trello… or even collaborative to-dos, like Wunderlist, Orchestra or Google Suite. Write down all the main and sub-actions required to achieve the main objective, going through the sub-objectives.
3. And don’t be afraid to delegate in the end…
You are the brain of your business: you deliver the vision, formulate the business strategy and develop your expertise or product. Gain expertise in what you do best. A touch of humility, you can’t do everything forever… As much as possible, assign tasks and missions that are not related to your core business!
Stop the dictatorship of urgency and the tyranny of information, and make way for responsible, creative and intelligent management of your time!