Just about all of us are overworked these days. There are two primary reasons for that. One, due to the recession and the jobless recovery*, we’re all being asked to do more than before. Two, we’re constantly having our time wasted by Maury the Management Moron and his imbecillic twins. The latter case can be rectified by following three simple rules of productivity, which will negate most of their efforts to waste your time and suck the soul out of you.
Rule #1: If you are invited to a meeting, and in the first five minutes it is wholly unclear why you are there, leave. Indicate that you’ll be back in 30 seconds if summoned.
If the organizer can’t be bothered to organize a successful meeting, why should you bother to be there?
Rule #2: If you are copied on an email that you do not need to be copied on, ask the email originator to re-send the email without you copied on it. (Or at the very least, to exclude you on all future messages on the topic.)
Enough spam gets through our spam filters and clutters our inbox as it is, which is already full of e-mail we have to deal with. No point adding to the mess.
Rule #3: If you are a manager, and you wake up one morning and realize that the only contribution you are making to the company is accepting statuses from lower level people and providing that same status to upper level people, quit.
Let’s face it. Your job’s not worth doing. Go find one that is — otherwise, all you are doing is contributing to the time crunch and soul suck.
* Which is one of my least favorite bullcrap phrases, because there is no recovery until jobs return.