With so many day to day tasks required to complete our jobs it is hardly surprising that some items don’t get completed when urgent projects appear on our desks instead. The day to day gives way to the fire fighting and unique most times. The use of a timetable is one way to coping with your daily (or routine) tasks, but often the rigid nature of a timetable means that it can be discarded in a matter of days when the other items get in the way (that spur of the moment meeting, that customer complaint, that colleague who has phoned in sick etc..). How can we create a way forward that is more flexible to cope with both the erratic demands on our time and the stability of routine tasks? You could consider a ‘start of shift’ approach with a list of tasks that need to be completed and an ‘end of shift’ slot so the tasks that didn’t get completed at the start of the day could be completed at the end. You could timetable parts of the week into our diaries, once we had worked out which...

There are so many things you can do with your business software and yet how many of us can really make the software work for our business? Just as so many people leave their formal education and don’t continue learning we do the same with our computer programs. We learn enough to get by, in most cases, and then don’t progress. Occasionally we could dip into the help menus and see what stood out as interesting, ask other people how they use the software (for tasks that take a long period of time for example) or search the web for ideas to improve what we do by researching better methods. If you used a small portion of your time at work to find better ways to use your software you could face a big improvement in productivity over the longer term (if not immediately), so why not start today?   Smartspeed Consulting Limited 'For When Results Matter' http://www.smartspeed.co.uk/