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cal problems reflecting insecurity and lack
of leadership skills.
Having identified the main principles for
planning our schedules correctly, we should
also mention several aspects, influences,
and strategies that have been badly inter-
preted, which normally come up and divert
our attention from our principal goal: com-
ply with our objectives as efficiently and ra-
pidly as possible by properly managing our
work space. These are what we call “time-
stealers” which most of us will be able to
identify:
•
Unnecessary interruptions, such as
continuous phone calls or the tempta-
tion to go and have a cup of coffee at
odd hours of the day. To prevent this,
we must study our work environment
and try to control it to the degree that
this may be possible.
•
Not knowing how to say “No”. Our
capacity is limited and if we know that
we are not going to be able to do so-
mething, we should reject the work,
postpone it, or pass it on to someone
else.
•
Doing more than one thing at a time
is NOT an efficient way of organizing
our time.
It is more productive to spend our time and
focus our efforts on one thing, complete it,
and then dedicate this same concentration
to another task.
•
People with greater responsibilities
should NOT work more hours to set an
example. Responsibility, the difficulty
or quality of work is not a question of
working more hours.
In fact, working too many hours makes
us tired and less efficient and productive.
In addition, this can also be interpreted as
lack of efficacy and sends out the wrong
message linking up efficiency with the num-
ber of hours spent working.
Responsibility and availability
Responsibility and availability are indepen-
dent concepts and could be in contradic-
tion.
Quite often, we stop doing an important ac-
tivity to take care of another secondary or
insignificant task just to prove that we are
available.
The quality of the decision-making process
does not improve just because we spend
more time on this process. Once we have
gathered the necessary and sufficient infor-
mation, the more time we let go by, the less
efficient the decision. We must understand
that in most cases, we will never be able
to have all the information that we would
want. Perfectionism, when badly interpre-
ted, could often be a sign of an indecisive
personality.
For now, we will not mention other issues
that could be subject to another article.
These could be family-related or psycholo-
gical (a bad marriage, being a workaholic,
etc.) which could, in some cases, be consi-
dered pathological.
In short, we are aware that the situations in
our jobs could be quite diverse and, in many
cases, not easy to solve. The approach we
suggest is difficult to apply in certain jobs
and specific cases requiring other types of
solutions. Nevertheless, we should start
to think about this problem which affects,
most particularly, the “Spanish way of wor-
king” and start to look for solutions to re-
solve this situation. More hours are spent
working in Spain and yet, productivity in this
country is among the lowest in comparison
with our neighbouring industrial countries.
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