How to Manage Interruptions | Articles

How to use power of time management in managing breaks and interruptions of one’s day? How to manage interruptions? The way people interrupt you can be challenging and quite annoying. Sometimes one thinks how it is possible to concentrate when everybody seem to get in the way with their requests, orders, commands, etc. Your boss alone can be the cause of a great many interruptions in a day. Here’s where time management skills come in.

Much as you can be confused over this, it has quite a simple, albeit somewhat unexpected, solution. Plan your breaks. Strange as it sounds, it works nevertheless. It works well enough to be one of the time management skills everyone should learn and master.

How does this work? There are two elements to consider. First, allocate some amount of time purely for handling ‘other people’s affairs.’ How do you normally handle it when a person rushes into your office asking you to help them out at once. What normally happens when someone calls or comes running into your office with something that they need your immediate help with? What’s worse, research indicates it may take you up to 20 minutes to come back full attention to whatever you were doing prior to the interruption. It’s about time you had a time tracking software to track those lost minutes.

A great way to avoid interruptions is choosing to work when interruptions are least likely to hit. If you have a flexible time table, try coming in early or staying late. Some people find early morning hours extremely productive.

It’s all very well, but we are talking about sensitive things here. Those ‘people’ normally are your superiors or the boss, it’s not like it’s the guy in the cubicle next door whom you can easily rebuff. So, what to do? If you have time allocated for such ‘contingencies’ in your daily schedule, it is OK. Now you have resources to help people and benefit from it in ways more than one.

Sticking to your plan and letting others know your availability are the second element in the strategy. Now, do not say it can’t be done. Give it a whirl. It’s worth it. It will surely increase your productivity, while giving you the reputation of a businesslike, minutes-counting person.

Here’s a plan. Get a good time tracking software and use it, to be able to tell at any moment how much time you are using and for what. Plan as much time for interruptions as you like. Experiment. With time you are bound to reckon what the right amount is. After all, we are talking about rationalizing your working day, so anything useful will be in order. You need to handle interruptions, so the best tack here would be to attack them.

Check out the time tracking software this website is dedicated to. Free version is available, as well as online version.

Articles

Effective Time Management in a World Short on Time
A curious advert caught my eye recently: “Shorter deadlines, competing priorities, endless meetings, interruptions and even higher quality expectations are just some of today’s time challenges. And yet the number of hours in the day remains the same.” Question springing right from it: How one can manage time to cram more things into a unit of time, such as an hour? read on…

Time Mastery vs. Time Management – Understanding the Difference
Mastering Your Time? What does it mean? Certainly not managing time. Between managing and mastering the way you use your time is quite a difference. Why we manage our time? Right, to be more efficient, to wring our day ‘dry to the last drop’ so as to have as much productivity squeezed out of as possible. To be an efficient time manager can be extremely beneficial, especially at times such as ours where time is almost everything. read on…

Is Attaining the Goal the Goal?
The world being as it is, careening headlong into the future, we are forced to do multiple tasks at once. Isn’t it the only way to finish what we need to do in a day if it only has 24 hours? The keynote of our training is the statement that if we attain all our goals in a period of time, we are deemed successful. read on…

What is Time and How We Measure It
To many a man the question ‘What is Time?’ is obvious. They say: Time? It’s an hour which divides into minutes and seconds, or it is a day which divides into hours and minutes, etc. etc.. To so many of us, the nature of time as a physical and philosophical phenomenon is a black cat in a dark room. read on…

Balancing Your Work Time Management Wise
Personal balance is envisioned by many as all kinds of things on the two pans of a scale, in perfect balance. This is a ridiculously naive goal. Plenty of frustration awaits anyone, who expects to lead life with everything, work, family, social life, allocated a certain amount of time everyday, so that’s every piece and bit is “in balance.” Just think of it. A delayed bus can ruin your business meeting, or exacting boss can keep you up at work well into after business hours breaking to pieces your day long looking forward to a cosy family dinner. read on…

How to Use Your Time Wisely
More often than not young people don’t get it how important time really is. They either just laze about, watch the box, or they lie in their bed, and play video games. As they grow older, they start to think about things they have achieved in life. And, much to their astonishment, they haven’t done a lot neither in personal development, nor in pursuing a career. read on…

How to Manage Your Time Best
What are two singularly important things in business? Right, money and time. However, it is money that most people care and tend to give more attention to, isn’t it? More often than not we think of time management in very simple terms, like: “What tasks am I to do today?”, or “What is my next task?” What’s worse, we pay time tracking far to little attention, despite its pivotal role in effective time management.read on…

Managing Your Time
Perhaps the greatest single problem that people have today is “time poverty.” Working people have too much to do and too little time for their personal lives. Most people feel overwhelmed with responsibilities and activities, and the harder they work, the further behind they feel. read on…

Why Waste Time on Trivia if You can Spend it on the Real Thing
Urgent matters that life is rife with really make very little difference in the final analysis. Say, you’re five minutes late for a corporate meeting. You are scolded like hell for just a five minutes, while a corporate meeting can prove a real waste of corporate time (including the chairperson’s), such as taking-so-long minutes of announcements that would be better off emailed you in advance. read on…

Management Tips

Whats Keeping You At The Office (9 Tips To Get Home Quicker)
“Work smarter, not harder” is a cliche that has darted in and out of the workplace for years. But it’s still as true as ever. And it’s often overlooked advice that truly works. “Working smarter” means think strategically about how to improve your productivity. read on…

Time Management Tips
To achieve maximum success and productivity in the work place it is essential that we understand how we use our time at work. Like many things in life, we take time for granted and give little thought to it until we no longer have enough of it. read on…

Time Management? No!
Many people want to be coached to manage their time better. I say NO! to that. You cannot manage time anyway; it just keeps ticking away no matter what you do. read on…

Time Management Tips – To Do List
When preparing a “to do” list you should also consider the things you should not be doing during your day. It’s fine to have a well planned to do list each day, but if you are easily distracted then it will be the things that you are doing in-between completing your list that will be the big time wasters. read on…