Cut interruptions and turn an 8-hour day into a very productive 5-hour day.
This has been confirmed in a 3,000 person 8 country study including the U.S.
But 49% in the U.S. said they need to resort to overtime to do the work that helps them stay employed.
Work creep has moved into our lives.
Four-day work weeks have been shown to reduce stress and make us more efficient because we have to make better decisions on the use of our time.
But, if you’re not in a position to opt for a four-day workweek as the employees of Gray Advertising in New York offers (for 85% of their employees’ salary), then one move makes a big difference.
End constant contact through email as you’re working.
Anything that competes for your time must be managed or else work creep returns, anxiety builds and you become less effective in your work.
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Hi Jerry,
Perfection is such a great topic!
I admit that I aim for perfection, taught to me, in part, by my folks, and later in the Air Force, and during my TV and radio career. (You and I have chatted before.)
In 1967, I was a kid just out of high school in suburban Boston and helped put together a small radio station in our town. Yup, the FCC found out about the operation, showed up in person, and as the two-man crew left, they whispered: “We get a lot of these stations, but yours is the most professionally-run that we’ve ever seen!” WOW!
The local papers did a couple of stories about two brothers and a friend running this station out of our friend’s home. It caught the eye of a local resident who, it turns out, was the film director at Ch. 7 in Boston. He asked if I’d like a summer job in his film department? And, my friend with the keen electronic background, ended up in Master Control.
(Later, he moved to Dallas to open his own audio company, went on the road with folks like Cat Stevens and Willie Nelson, today operates his own station QX-FM.com and recently opened a communications and broadcast museum, profiled on this Texas program: http://thetexasbucketlist.com/2016/04/the-texas-bucket-list-texas-museum-of-broadcasting-and-communications.)
I’m getting ahead of myself. :)
One day at work, as I was splicing commercials together, my boss, the film director, asked me about a problem that impacted commercials on the air. Turns out that during my inspection and cleaning of the commercial film reel being readied for broadcast, I had failed to remove a three-inch piece of masking tape used as a reminder that a missing commercial needed to be inserted at this point on the reel. The head of engineering came down and was none too happy with me as the film reel gummed up the projector, and I couldn’t blame anybody, but myself. It was a very strong lesson learned.
Time marched on and I continued working Ch.7 as a writer, producer, and assignment editor and spent 13 years during the infancy of rock and the later switch to talk, much of the time as a news anchor, at WRKO. And, as you know, Jerry, perfection was an absolute key to success
Attention to detail (is that different from perfection?) is so paramount in all walks of life, even at home with the family. But, my wife believes that I’m a bit too gung-ho while she’s the complete opposite.
For example, she’ll constantly forget to turn off, say, a closet light, leaving the switch-flipping to me. So, as you can see, the issue of perfection can be a source of irritation. But, in my experience of 40 years in broadcasting, perfection leads all of us down the golden path.
My apologies for being so long-winded!
Ron