• What advice can you share for staying productive all day?
• How do you manage email overload?

14. Handling Repetitive Processes and Projects

As you work over and over on a specific task, activity, process or project, there could be opportunities or areas for making improvements and increase efficiencies.

An initial step in handling repetitive or routine processes is by mapping out all the steps required to complete an activity.

Then look for areas to eliminate or consolidate steps where possible and with proper authorization without compromising the final output.

Time savings can also be achieved by preparing templates such as weekly report templates, progress report templates, to do list template, budget template, standard operating procedure template etc.

Additionally, preparing standard responses for commonly asked questions, or preparing a frequently asked questions list and answers helps to save time in the long run.

Implement quality control checkpoints such as kickoff meetings at the beginning of major projects to explain requirements, deadlines and reporting needed to ensure everyone is on the same page before proceeding.

At the tail end of a process, conduct postmortems or lessons learned when a project is finished to explore how to improve the next project.

Areas for improvement can include better communication to ensure that everyone is on the same page regarding expectations, frequency of team meetings and working on improving turnaround or response time.

15. Managing Perfectionism and Procrastination

On the one hand managing perfectionism is about knowing when to step on the brakes once you have reached a destination instead of keeping on driving.

On the other hand managing procrastination entails pushing yourself to step on the gas in order to arrive at a desired endpoint.

15.1 Managing Perfectionism

Perfectionism is the craving, desire and practice to keep making something better and better. It can be manifested through extremely high personal standards of excellence such as one should never make a mistake or fail.

The desire for perfectionism can stretch the amount of time spent on an activity in the quest of making it perfect to the detriment of eating up time for doing other competing priorities.

The desire for perfectionism can likewise slow you down and lead to indecision and spending too much time on a simple task, not knowing or being able to stop working on something and getting so caught up in polishing details and over processing.

Steps for managing perfectionism include being flexible, learning what the acceptable norms and standards are for completed work and using this as a guide to strive for, giving a task your best effort then let it go, shipping out a task when it is ready, has met an acceptable standard and is good enough then move on to the next task mingle2.

15.2 Managing Procrastination

Procrastination can cause a to-do list to have a specific set of tasks that are ever present and keep rolling over from one to-do list to another constantly weighing you down from the knowledge that you have so much pending work which has to be tackled at some point.

Procrastination can be revealed through the habit of continuously putting off tasks that you dislike doing and doing things at the last minute – where you are scared to start or not motivated enough and are simply avoiding tasks until you have no choice but to do them because the tasks won’t go away on their own.

As mentioned earlier, procrastination can likewise be caused by perfectionism, where you put off work because it will take too much time to complete it to your desired standards.