![]() Guarding time for projects as a recurring event starts to open up some room between meetings. ![]() It’s likely people will try to schedule meetings during those times, but when you can, hold firm to those boundaries. ![]() Some others have two, two-hour blocks of time in the afternoons each week marked as “busy.” Inserting in project time to give you at least an hour to get things done each day, preferably more, allows you to build some momentum day-by-day and week-by-week. For example, some of my coaching clients will block out an hour or two each morning for focused work. And when you come back to work on the presentation after some time away, you’ll know what you’ve accomplished and what’s next.Īnother strategy is to protect some unbroken stretches of time in your schedule by putting in project time as a recurring event. Distribute deck and meeting agenda prior dayĮven if you can just tick off one or two of these items at a time, you are still making progress.Schedule meeting to review the deck internally prior to the board meeting.Think through the structure of the presentation.Search for boss’s email about key points she wants covered.For example, to prep for a presentation, you might write out: You can use your checklist as a guide for how to make incremental progress when you have a 30-minute break between meetings. Next, to understand how to work on big projects in the smaller spaces between meeting, break the larger item into smaller parts. A better approach is to accept and work within the reality that meetings happen. Waiting for a slice of project nirvana keeps you from getting started when you can. A meeting-free day or even half-day may be your ideal, but you may never have this type of time. You and Your Team Series Getting More Work Doneįirst off, I want to challenge the idea that there’s a “perfect” time to move ahead on projects. Here are some tips on how to get project work done even when you need to start and stop for meetings. But as a time management coach, I’ve seen that even if this way of working has been your life-long pattern, you can develop a more sustainable and less stressful approach to projects. This cycle of knowing what your most important priority is, but feeling like meetings keep you from doing it, can be incredibly frustrating. You meet the deadline, but suffer in the process and dread the next time you need to finish another large task. In a flurry of activity, you work day and night to get it done. But meetings keep interfering and your presentation languishes on your to-do list, weighing heavily on your mind until you can’t escape it any longer. So you keep waiting for the “perfect time” to sit down and knock out the whole project in one go. And when you had a bit of time between them, you didn’t make any progress on your presentation. But at the end of the day, your resolve has turned to dismay: yet again, you spent most of your time in meetings. Each morning, you emphatically write at the top of your to-do list, “Work on presentation!” Perhaps you even underline it a time or two for emphasis.
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