How to get organised at work: 4 tips for managing your priorities
12/6/2021
Léa Zolli Durand
Léa Zolli Durand

How to get organised at work: 4 tips for managing your priorities

Being better organised at work and managing your priorities is really an essential skill, whatever your level in the company, whether you are an employee or a manager. This is what will often make the big difference between your competence and your success. Beyond what you know how to do, do you know how to structure it, how to organise it, how to put your priorities before other priorities and how to do it in a very disciplined way?

Talentis gives you four points of reference to learn how to organise yourself at work.

#1 Define your beacon to organise your work

A lighthouse represents what you need to achieve, a project on which you really need to make a difference. Regularly, once a year or every semester, ask yourself: "What is my lighthouse?", give yourself two or three very clear objectives that will direct your year and that you will look after with great care.

How will this beacon inform all your organisational decisions? Does what you are doing help you move towards your lighthouse or away from it? It may be a strategic project that you absolutely need to succeed. It may be three people you want to bring into the team and invest time in to help them succeed in their work. Or it may be a major innovation that you want to develop within your company. What is your flagship for the year, and how are you going to protect it in your diary so that it doesn't get overrun with things that will prevent you from achieving it!

#2 Putting your big rocks first

Most of the time, your agenda is overrun with meetings that your colleagues organise and place in your agenda for you. You know the story of the big stones, or if you don't, we invite you to read our article on the subject (see below). What does it mean to look after your big stones? It means having a proactive agenda, not a reactive one. The Americans call this "time-boxing".

In time-boxing, I take care of my big stones, I choose the priorities of the day, the week, the month, and I reserve time for myself in my diary. This is where the RVMMs come in, the "Rendez-Vous with Myself". It's a way of clearing your brain, which is often invaded by worries, deadlines and various projects, by inserting time in your diary to prepare meetings or appointments where no one will disturb you.

Read more: How to manage your time better with large stones

#3 Know how to identify your time-suckers

Know how to identify your time-consuming tasks, i.e. anything that disturbs you and disrupts your organisation. Typically, reading emails is a very time-consuming task. To remedy this, a good practice is to read them three times a day in groups. Set three times a day when you read, file, reply to or delete these emails. If you are one of those people who read them as you go, you are wasting between two and three hours a day. This is the law of immediate action, so you can concentrate on thirty-minute or one-hour tasks.

Other time-consuming elements may simply be people who systematically bother you. Perhaps you can find a way to organise regular check-ins with them. For example, a point in the morning before starting the day, or after lunch, where you list all the items at once rather than being disturbed several times during the day. Pay attention to your time-consuming tasks and negotiate with yourself or your environment to manage them in the best possible way.

#4 Getting organised at work: the urgent and the important

Knowing how to differentiate between the urgent and the important is no easy task, as the trap is to manage everything at the same level. Learning to manage the non-urgent important and the non-urgent urgent differently is like mastering the famous Eisenhower matrix.

Getting organized at work: the urgent and the important

The non-urgent important is precisely what you can keep putting off, saying: "Well, it's true that it's very important, very strategic, but I'll end up finding time, there are too many little things in the emergency right now that are preventing me from getting to it. Protect the non-urgent important things at all costs and take an hour a day to deal with the non-urgent urgent things.

The urgent unimportant, i.e. all the little things that clutter up our lives : filing papers, tidying the desk, changing the light bulb... In short, all the little things that need to be done before they become unbearable, but which cannot take all day. Otherwise you'll feel in the evening that you haven't done anything of value that will move you towards your lighthouse.

Managing priorities is a skill that requires discipline and rigour, it doesn't just happen, however we hope these four points of reference will help you move towards your ideal agenda. In any case, if you would like to find out how business coaching can help you or members of your team to get better organised at work, we recommend you download our guide.

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