New year, new work plan

As most of you know, I work. You might also know that I work quite a lot. Noticing a rather big dip in motivation (and thus productivity), I've decided to change that. The overall goal is to work less and have some more time for more rewarding things in life. What are those things? I don't know, but at the same time I haven't really had any time to find out during the last couple of years.

To achieve this I looked at my current work situation and found two big time thieves: meetings and emails. These are the things that are forcing me to work nights to be able to keep up. The plan is then to address these issues.

Meetings

I attend a lot of meetings, most of which don't really achieve anything and which I'm not really able to participate actively in since I'm focusing on trying to catch up on my email (see next section). My new goal is to limit the number of meetings each week to a maximum of 10. I'd say that an average meeting is about 1.5 hours long, which adds up to 15 hours a week. That's still 37.5% of my (supposed) workweek, but it still leaves a lot of time for other things, while making me more focused during these high-priority meetings.

Only attending 10 meetings per week will require me to decline and prioritize a lot more meetings than I do now. The obvious ones are meetings with no proper agenda or stated purpose and goal. Those are out immediately. The rest will probably be harder to handle, but needs to prioritized among themselves. This will most likely result in a lot more late declinations (I'm fully booked, ie 10 meetings, and it's Wednesday with one hour to go before a planned meeting. I then receive an invitation to a Friday meeting which I feel is more important. Then I won't attend the Wednesday meeting), but I'm still quite optimistic to this approach. If this works out well, I might limit the number of meetings even further.

Email

Email is very time consuming, especially if monitoring your inbox all the time. I'm getting better at not checking email too often, but from now on I'll only be reading (and handling) my emails two times a day. No email is that urgent that it can't wait a couple of hours. Exactly when I'll handle my email I'll have to figure out as time goes, but I'll have plenty of time between those, on average, two meetings per day to do it.

I will also try to call people instead of sending emails, as this is usually a lot more time efficient.

Work time

The idea is that limiting meetings and inefficient email reading will make me more productive. I'll be able to do what needs to be done quicker and can thus leave work earlier. I plan to keep to a 40-hour workweek from now on, and actively avoid working at nights and weekends. In theory, this will in turn make me even more productive, and the end result is that everyone is happy.

Limiting the week to 40 hours will however most likely result in me saying "no" to a lot more things. "Will you be able to do this?", "Have you done that?", etc. We'll see how it goes.

Conclusion

I don't know if, or for how long, I'll be able to keep to this. I'll definitely try. I believe that this is something that potentially could make me more productive at work, while at the same time give me more free time. And the end result is hopefully that I'll be happier in general.