The District Magazine Vol. 3 NEW BEGINNINGS 2018 | Page 36

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hour of time on something that will bring them
multiple, repetitive benefits in the near future.
You can apply this to every aspect of your life,
personally and professionally. From how you do
chores, to how you spend money, to how you can
become insanely productive at work, and even
to how you communicate! It is so simple. It just
requires you to think a little differently.
Here are four simple changes I made
in just the first 30 days of 2018 that
have already made me so much
more efficient. Try these out for
yourself now!
1
Figure out what you can automate,
delegate, or eliminate. Make a list of
everything you feel responsible for in your
life, both personally and professionally.
If any of these items don’t require your unique
personality and skillset, then find tools to either
automate them or spend a few hours training
someone else to do them for you. This is
imperative if you’re in growth mode.
What are some common examples? Automatic
bill pay, virtual assistants, HootSuite for social
media management, email campaign tools,
delegate work to your employees or kids, or turn
on Roomba to clean your floors while you work.
2
Categorize your inbox and dedicate
time blocks for each category.
Categorize your day job, communications,
and responsibilities. Then, carry these
categories through to your inbox and your
calendar.
For example, I’m a recruiter so I can break
my day into the following categories –
LinkedIn sourcing and resume reviews, phone
interviews, candidate correspondence, manager
correspondence, offers and compensation, and
other administrative tasks.
Next, I assign dedicated time blocks for these
tasks every 1-2 days. Multitasking often does
way more harm than good if you don’t know how
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to do it right, so you’ve got to create time blocks
and stick to them. This gives your brain time to
operate at 100% capacity versus switching back
and forth throughout the day.
Next, and MOST IMPORTANT. Create these
exact same categories in your inbox. As emails
come in, assign them the respective category and
put them on hold until it’s time for you to work in
that category. You can sort your Outlook inbox
by category assignments. So if you’ve dedicated
1-2pm as candidate follow-up time, then you just
filter your inbox for that category color and go
to work.
3
Email templates are a godsend. The
amount of time we spend teeing up
emails is insane, this will change your
life. Reflect on the most common emails
you send, or even the most common responses
you make to emails, and save these into Outlook
templates. You can highlight the few areas in
the email header or body that you might want
to personalize, but the important thing here is