The Focused And Disciplined Boss   Intellectually, we all know what we should be doing and how we should be doing it, but that isn’t how things work in the real world is it! We have turned our email inboxes into giant parking lots for stranded emails, which get no attention, but are parked there ready for action. We know we are wasting a lot of time in meetings, but the meetings are always scheduled for an hour where everyone follows Parkinson’s Law and allows the work to expand to fit the time. We have papers, magazines we will never read but aspire to and reports piled high on all flat surfaces within arms reach. Another parking lot for the parentless paper trail.   So much time is spent on organising the logistics of leading today. Sorting through stuff to decide what to do about it, rather than actually doing it. We file emails or electronic documents and then can’t remember where we filed them so spend time hunting them down. We keep shunting paper around from one spot to another, because we can’t commit to knocking the work off and moving onto to the next task. Democratically, we all have 1440 minutes in a day, but we can’t actually manage time - we can’t flex it into 1441 minutes a day. We can only manage ourselves and the priorities we set.   Chaos for one is flexibility for another. Your workspace looks like a bomb went off, but magically and annoyingly, you can retrieve the exact piece of information needed from the rubble on command. Others have almost empty desks, where neatness shines like a beacon of hope for everyone else. Everything in its place and a place for everything. Smarty-pants types!   Which one are you: supreme order or supreme chaos? Is there a right answer? No, we all have our own ways of working. It is the amount of productivity our systems allow us, that makes all the difference.   What about where we spend our time relative to past, present and future activities. Again, there is no correct answer, we must however decide where to direct our energies. As another way of looking at our way of organising our work, we can break tasks up into past, present and future.   Past might coalesce calls to be returned, emails to be answered, reports to be written, etc. Present might encompass today’s meetings, urgent matters that pop up and require boss attention so that staff members can do their work or any deadlines due today. Future might be travel arrangements, project proposals to be approved, future deadlines coming nearer, people who need to be contacted.   We might take tasks from each group, list them up by group and give each a priority number of order of attention. We might rotate through each group, doing one from the past, then one from the present and next one from the future, before moving down to the next number on the list of priorities.   We can do it this way, just to bring a little variety to the way we normally work. Sometimes shining a light on tasks makes us realise we have forgotten to give a project sufficient time or we have not put enough effort into the Important but Not Urgent category of planning. Doing things the same way all the time is comfortable. It is good to put ourselves in places outside our Comfort Zone, if we want to drive greater productivity and clarity around task completion.   Here are a couple of productivity tips worth thinking about. Allow an extra 25% of time for completion of a task. Often we cut things too fine, so we never ever get around to completion or to a critical mass on a piece of work. That little bit of extra time may move the needle to see that work completed or almost completed, rather than being tossed into the bottomless pit of started, but not realised projects.   Before we head home, we should look at the next day’s schedule and priorities for that day. This gets our mind organised for the next day, so we are ready to go immediately when we get to work and we catch any preparation we need for the next day, which we may have forgotten about.   W