Forbes has an article called “14 Things You Should Do at the Start of Every Work Day”. Really? 14 things before you start to work? Procrastination is enough of a problem (“Maybe I do need a second cup of coffee.”) without having not 1, 2, or 3 things but 14 before starting to work.
Number 1 is “arrive on time”. OK.
But number 3 is “take five”. That’s good advice for maybe 10:30 or so, but to start out?
Number 8, maybe (they aren’t numbered, just one to a slide) is don’t check your email. But the very next one is to check your voicemail. Curious.
The next item on the list is “Place important calls and send urgent e-mails.” I’m fine with sending urgent emails, but if you get to the office at 7:40 (as I did before retirement) making a bunch of calls at that time accomplishes very little, unless you are calling people one or two time zones farther east.
After this we have “Plan a mid-morning break.” Really? One of the14 things you should do at the start of every work day is to plan your mid-morning break? Do I really want to have employees who make planning their mid-morning break a high priority?
It’s not all crap advice, of course. Making a “to-do” list is a good place to start, although frankly I always had one left over from yesterday to serve as a start, and those urgent emails were a good source of information for editing the “to-do” list.
No comments:
Post a Comment