Give Yourself Permission … To Work Smart

I have to be honest the past few months have been quite a roller coaster ride for me. The strides I made in the early part of 2008 towards working smart, had slowly slipped through my fingers.

No, no, no lol, its not that I became less smarter, definitely not! Don’t get me wrong! I am talking about “Working Smart”. My time, money and energy were not utilized in the right way. My priorities were a big fuzzy and well we know that things to do list was not being referred to as much as I should have been doing.

As a part of getting on track and sticking there, one of the key things I decided to do was to give myself permission….. I gave myself permission to take time to learn how to do my job faster. It’s something that in 2008 I missed. I was always focused on just getting the job done and making the deadlines. This year I have been spending more time to “work smart”. 

Let me give you an example. 

I created filters for my gmail 2 of them being a documents filter and images filters. Now, anytime someone sends an image or document to me it gets highlighted. Most of the images I get are actually posters and the documents are proposals. These filters make it a no brainer to find documents or posters in no time amidst the tonnes of emails the flow into my inboxes on a daily basis. It has made my life soo much easier. Let share them with you, after all sharing is caring. And I do care! 

For GMAIL

(Matches: (.jpg OR .png OR .gif OR .bmp OR .jpeg) has:attachment

Do this: Apply label “Pic”)

Matches: (.doc OR .pps OR .xls OR .pdf OR .docx OR .ppsx OR .xlsx) has:attachment

Do this: Apply label “Docs”)

Some of the other things I did were –  

– Get my facebook under control

– Organize my workspace making sure I have all my tools to get the job done

– Organise my blackberry alerts using – AlertMatrix

Basically I allowed myself to also question my workflows to see if they were effective. In some cases they needed to be changed. I found a change in my perspective of some tasks made my load much lighter. E.g, writing and presenting I not treat as one in the same. They are both communication, different forms of communication but none the less they are communication. I think the key though to working smart especially in this recession time is to build a network of persons and develop healthy give and take relationships. Solve your problems together.

Are you capable of giving yourself the permission to work smart? Are you ready for the next level?

Corey Graham 2.0^N

www.coreykgraham.com