How to organize yourself at work: 4 tips for managing priorities

Better organizing yourself at work and managing your priorities is really an essential skill, regardless of 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, organize it, put your priorities before other priorities and do it in a very disciplined way?

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

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#1 Define your lighthouse to organize your work

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One phare represents what you need to succeed in, a project you really need to do Making a difference. Regularly, once a year or every semester, ask yourself: “What is my lighthouse? ”, give yourself two or three very clear goals that will steer your year and that you will take care of with great care.

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What does this lighthouse do inform all your organizational decisions ? Does what you do help you move towards your lighthouse or, on the contrary, take you away from it? It may be a strategic project that you absolutely have need to succeed. It can be three people to be integrated into the team and for whom you want invest time to help them succeed in their work. It can also be a major innovation that you want to develop within your company. What is your lighthouse of the year, and how are you doing protect in your agenda so that it is not invaded by things that will prevent you from reaching it!

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#2 Prioritize your big pebbles

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Most of the time, your agenda is invaded by meetings that your employees organize and position in your agenda for you. Do you know the history of big pebbles, or if this is not the case, we invite you to read our article on this subject (see below). What does it mean to take care of your big pebbles? It means knowing how to have a proactive agenda and not a reactive agenda. Americans call it the Time-boxing.

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In time-boxing, I take care of my big pebbles, I choose the priorities of the day, of the week, of the month, and I reserve time for myself in my agenda. That's where the RVMM, the “Appointments with Myself”. It is a way of cleaning your brain, which is often full of worries, deadlines and various projects, by putting time into your agenda to prepare for meetings or appointments where no one will disturb you.

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To read: Know how to better manage your time with big stones

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#3 Know how to identify your chronophages

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Know how to identify your chronophages, that is to say everything that bothers you and disrupts your organizing. 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. Spend three times a day reading, filing, replying, or deleting these emails. If you are one of the people who read them over and over again, you lose between two and three hours a day. It's about the Law of immediate action, you can then focus on tasks that last thirty minutes or one hour.

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Other time-consuming elements may simply be people who are always bothering you. Maybe you can find a way to organize with them regular points. For example, a point in the morning before starting the day, or after lunch, where you list all the points at once rather than being disturbed several times during the day. Pay attention to your time consuming and Negotiate with yourself or with your environment to best manage them.

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#4 Organizing yourself at work: the urgent and the important

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Knowing how to differentiate the urgent from the important is not an easy task, overall the trap is to manage everything at the same level. Learning to manage the important non-urgent and the urgent not important differently is the same as mastering the famous Eisenhower matrix.

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The important non-urgent thing is just what you can continue to do push back in time by saying: “Well, it is true that it is very important, very strategic, but I will end up finding time, there are too many small things in the emergency right now that prevent me from going there.” Protect At any cost the important non-urgent ones and take an hour a day to deal with the important non-important ones.

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The urgent not important, that is to say all the little things that we clutter : filing papers, tidying up the desk, replacing the light bulb... In short, all the little things you need to do before it becomes unbearable, but which cannot take all day. Otherwise, you will have the feeling in the evening that you have done nothing that is valuable and that makes you feel good. Move towards your lighthouse.

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Knowing how to manage your priorities is a skill that requires discipline and rigor, it does not happen by itself, however we hope that these four points of reference will help you move towards your ideal agenda. In any case, if you want to find out how professional coaching can help you or members of your team better organize yourself at work, we recommend that you download our guide.

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Download the professional coaching guide