Get organized for the fall!

By: Katie Murtha MS, RD (www.RDKate.com)

It’s hard to believe, but summer has flown by and stores are already advertising for going back to school. Whether you work for a company or have started your own, fall is also an important time for rolling out new programs, campaigns, and services that we dietitians have spent all summer planning and developing. But before you get too crazy, it’s time to get organized. August is a great to to re-evaluate how you spend your time so you can be as productive as possible once fall rolls around…

First, print off  a daily schedule broken down by the day, by the hour, for 7 days (one whole week). Alternatively, use your outlook calendar or perhaps an excel file. Step by step, fill in first when you sleep. Next, schedule out time spent on self-care, making and eating meals, and time spent with family and/or friends. Then, fill in commuting time and other things such as exercise or other planned activities. Finally, look critically at your work days and schedule out times for meetings, blogging, researching, writing, grading, rounding or other tasks you might do during the week. This is a great way to see where you might be wasting time or where you may have more time than you thought. Make a schedule and stick to it! This will help decrease stress and increase productivity.

Once you have your week organized, it’s time to be more efficient on a daily basis. To stay organized daily, make a list. Either right before you end your day and right at the start of your day, write down everything you need to get done that next or current day. After you have your list, it’s time to prioritize. There are many different ways to do this, but often the easiest is just to use your ABC’s. Put an “A” next to activities that absolutely must be done now. Place a “B” next to those that had better get done soon. Use a “C” next to those items that can wait. Finally, a “D” indicates that these activities can be delegated and don’t require follow-up (my favorite category). If you find that you have labeled everything with an “A”, then it may be smarter for you to schedule out your list with a designated time for each task. Keeping yourself on that schedule will assure that all those important things actually get done.

There’s nothing that can destroy your productivity and increase your procrastination as well as social media. Whether it’s email listservs, newsletters, blogs, facebook, Twitter, or Google+, it’s amazing how easy it is to log on and suddenly you have lost 3 hours. For some of you (myself included) social media is important for doing business and building clientele. However, just because you need to log on to Twitter to reply to a client’s question, this doesn’t mean you then need to spend 30 minutes reading everyone else’s posts for the last 2 hours. Start being picky with who you follow and who you read and make sure this time relates to your overall goals right now. Also, try to set time limits for these activities. If you can keep email checking and listserv reading to 30 minutes, that’s great! It gives you more time to do more important things.

Another helpful tip to control social media is to link all of your accounts. When I update my blog, it updates Twitter, which updates Facebook. That saves time! There are also programs you can use to schedule Tweets so you don’t have to log back in every time you want to Tweet something. Make yourself familiar with these time-saving applications and use them!