When was the last time you worked overtime?
Or missed your lunch break to finish the deck of BoD slides just in time?
Or skipped lunch, and coffee and stayed after office hours, just to ¨catch up with things¨?
No wonder. Your Assistant role is demanding and full. Just as your calendar is.
But more often than not, we end up working extended hours not because of the amount of work that we have, but because we fail to plan.
We say yes to more things than we are capable of doing
We underestimate how long those tasks would take
We overestimate our speed and efficiency
And hey, that´s not to criticise your speed. Or productivity. The fact is that in the Assistant role, tasks naturally take longer to finish because you are interrupted ALL-THE-TIME. By the phone that´s ringing, by the catering that has to be signed off, by a colleague who can´t figure out how a printer works… You get it. It´s the nature of the role.
So we need to help ourselves with planning tasks in a real-life scenario (meaning constant interruptions) instead of a perfect one - nobody is in the office and nobody is asking me for anything.
The fact is, it will never happen! Unless you stay after hours once all your colleagues are gone. And that´s a no go.
Help yourself to avoid over-planning. Understand how long your big tasks ACTUALLY take.
Go through your calendar of the last month and identify what are the events that cause you overworking on a regular bases. Is it a BOARD meeting and preparation for it? Monthly operational review? Submitting expenses?
Note them down and once you´ve identified your biggest time stealers, understand how long those tasks take.
Next time you will be working on that particular task,- time it! Use one of the timers (most of them are free and available online). I use ATRACKER It´s free, simple and I use it as an APP on my phone. ATRACKER does precisely that,- it tracks time. It´s great that is requires minimum setup and allows you to focus on work rather than trying to figure out the fancy software.
It sounds super simple, but it does miracles to your sanity when you are planning tasks with their real duration in mind. This way next time you´ll know, that getting slides done for a monthly meeting takes 7h rather than your optimistic 3 hours.
Also, you could time how long your Executive takes on different tasks and plan his or her time better if you notice that certain meetings tend to overlap on a regular bases.
Try it. I hope this helps to have less no-time-to-pee days!