Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 24 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: Touch it once
— From The Ultimate Sales Machine: Turbocharge Your Business with Relentless Focus on 12 Key Strategies by Chet Holmes
What would you do with a gift of 90+ hours/year to spend however you see fit?
To explain this, let me share this scenario, and you tell me if it sounds familiar:
“You come into your office, and there on your desk sit three folders and two letters that you must respond to. You look at the first letter and read a few sentences. Dealing with it is clearly going to take more time than you have right now. You put it aside. In one of your folders is another task. You handle that task and your phone rings. You answer the phone and get pulled in a new direction for 10 to 15 minutes. Then you go back to the folder, but, just as you do, an email comes in. You stop to read the email, which contains a task that must be dealt with but requires more time than you have right now.”
Can you identify with this? If you spend “just 15 minutes every day to revisit, readdress, or reread documents or emails, you will waste 91 hours per year where no action is taken.” (!)
Chet Holmes, business guru and author of The Ultimate Sales Machine, had a simple, yet practical and very effective way of handling paperwork and email: deal with each thing just once.
“If you touch it, take action. […] Don’t open that email or letter until you are ready to deal with it.”
And dealing with it may take many forms, but at the very least, it means adding the action to your to-do list and saving the email to a particular folder. Holmes says, “the more files you have for work in progress and the more organized you can be in that process, the more productive you will be. So, for example, suppose I open my email from my PR firm that requires me to approve a press release. I have a PR folder. On my to-do list I write, ‘Approve press release. See PR folder.’ That’s how organized you need to be today.”
Short and simple, yet profound in changing the way we work and handle the demands for our time. Plus, the amount of time we’ll save from not having to revisit is astonishing! (For other time saving tips, read this post from Time Traps.)
ACTION
TODAY: Try this touch-it-once approach today and see how much time you save and how much more organized you get.
FUTURE: Make this touch-it-once philosophy a part of your productivity habits. As with every new habit, it will take time and tweaking to adapt to your specific needs, yet I strongly suggest giving it a shot since it will save you much time!
Know someone who’s wasting much time on revisiting things? Please share this post with that person via email, Facebook or Twitter, thank you!