It’s official—the working day is now three hours long. Okay, maybe not officially, but by the time you’ve answered e-mails, returned calls, had meetings, and collected dry cleaning (in your ever-decreasing lunch hour), it’s time to go home.
“Workloads
are heavier,” states Kathleen Alessandro, CEO of Energized Solutions, a
consulting firm that advises organizations about innovative ways to do
more with less time. Alessandro blames our “hyper-communication” age,
where having the ability to instantly respond means we usually do—at a
cost to precious time. “The average worker receives between 100 and 200
e-mails a day, is interrupted every seven minutes by someone wanting an
immediate response, and is chronically slowed by inefficient office
practices,” she says. This shrinking number of effective work hours has
prompted heavyweights like IBM and Microsoft to create task forces to
troubleshoot this very problem.
So how do we keep on top of the clock? Here, Alessandro provides some time-management tips.
