One Little Change

I need to do something.  Anything. 

My work life is really amazing - I mean it's so much more than I had envisioned.

Here comes the "But...."

I hate Thursday.  Second only to Mondays, which everyone hates, Thursday is a nightmare for me. 

I have a crazy inbox.  I mean,  we really conduct the majority of our business through the inbox. I need to hold myself to a four hour response time.  My region is crazy - So - you can imagine how a regular weekday goes.

I handle it pretty well overall but in all honesty, I'm putting easily 12-15 hours more per week than I should be, just to stay on top of it.  "Should" meaning, it's not good for me to be putting that kind of time in as opposed to "should"  meaning, I'm not capable of getting the work done. 

So in an effort not to "should" myself ( an old WW term),  I've decided to enable some technology changes to my Thursday.

I took a look back at the last 2 months of Thursdays to see a couple of things:

  1. My inbox starts really ramping up high at 11AM and goes at a breakneck pace to around 7PM
  2. My calendar has weird pockets of time in which to manage my inbox in the afternoon
  3. I have a recurring monthly call that seemed to be on the last Thursday of the month and suddenly is overlapping another call?  Hmm, odd. 

My Calendar, it seems, is the culprit.  I have a love / hate relationship with the calendar.  I desperately want to murder it on some days, other's, I couldn't care less. 

So I got to thinking what could I do to make my Thursdays more productive knowing full well that I have at least two and half hours from noon- five  that I can't manage my inbox.

I took a look at the tools I have at my disposal, and there are a few tools that make working through this harrowing day better. 

One big one is Boomerang. It's a game changer - seriously. 

This tool is an extension for outlook.  It enables you to return emails that haven't been answered, back to your inbox at a later date and time.  That's it's big feature.  If I'm working late on a Thursday to catch up, and I don't my partners trying to communicate after hours, I can ask boomerang to send it at a later time. 

Another killer tool is the Smartsheet outlook extension.

We use Smartsheet at my company, and this tool enables me to add my smartsheet entries right out of email.  I don't have to open it up and sort through it. 

My last tool is the echo dot.   Just today, I integrated all my calendars, both personal and professional, on there and it announces the entries to me throughout the day. 

I also integrated Ring Central - this one will take a bit to fully integrate with my computer and my echo dot, but I see long range potential here. 

I'm actually looking forward to Thursday.

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