Reactionary Workflow

How are you managing your day-to-day routines to avoid reactionary workflow?

Instead of being proactive, and spending our time on what matters most, it is all too easy to become increasingly reactive by paying more attention to the latest text or tweet that comes our way.

While serving others is an important part of most jobs, if we’re not careful, we can find ourselves getting to the end of the day without having accomplished our biggest priorities.

In Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus & Sharpen Your Creative Mind, Jocelyn Glei describes how easy we can end up working at the mercy of our surroundings.

Too often, we spend the best part of our day on other people’s priorities, as we attempt to clear the decks by responding to emails and voicemails before we get to our own work.

This can result in us approaching our own work when we no longer have the level of focus and energy we had at the beginning of our day.

For many of us, this means that we must turn away from email and the phone, for long enough chunks of time, so we can get our most creative work done before we end up in reactive mode.

To avoid reactionary workflow, we must take more control over how we spend our days. For some, this may mean blocking off the first couple of hours each day to work on our most important projects.

For others, the most creative time of the day may be later in the afternoon. Each of us knows our own body rhythms sufficiently to determine the most appropriate time to hold sacred.

Mark McGuinness, in “Laying the Groundwork for an Effective Routine”, cautions that asserting more control over our own time can feel uncomfortable to us, and even cause some people to get upset”.

Balancing the time necessary for being our most productive and creative selves with the time needed to serve others, however, is a key requirement for success in life, and is an important characteristic of “the fit leader”.