Four o’clock in the morning, a distant cry. You are awakened from a deep sleep. Nothing serious. A nightmare of the youngest child. Turning in circles in bed, eyes on the ceiling. Relive the annoyances of the day before. 6:15 a.m., eyelids become heavy. 6:30 a.m., the alarm rings. Damage. Shower and breakfast dispatched, make sure the school bags are ready, the big girl’s pool bag too. No, it’s Monday. The swimming pool is tomorrow. Don’t forget to start a machine, long program. Rally the troops. “Come on, we’re going to be late again!” We put on the coat. Personal phone in left pocket. The pro on the right. Hey, 16 notifications. Anxiety. A detour through the school, then towards line 6. No. Traveler incident. Saved, there is still a velib’ available. No. A torn pedal. To walk. Run. Sweat. Goodbye morning freshness. The office elevator opens (phew it’s working today), running into the financial director. A certain talent for selling dreams: “I set a time for us at 9:30 a.m. to prepare the Codir the day after tomorrow”. Urgent files will wait… “Every morning, we have a mission. Find joy in the midst of reasons to despair”, whispered Edouard Baer at the microphone of Radio Nova. Is the day going to be long? There is no fatality.
Emails and meetings, the big cleaning
Stop meetings on Monday morning. According to recent data from Microsoft which has combed through the habits of millions of users around the world, we spend an average of two days a week on emails and meetings. Another study carried out by the American giant indicates that two out of three employees have difficulty finding the time and energy necessary to carry out their primary missions. The French would spend more than three hours per week in meetings that do not concern them. Action reaction. First thing to do: ban Monday morning points. This is when executives feel most productive, so let’s avoid distracting them and disrupting their concentration. Also to avoid encroaching on their privacy. “An employee may feel the need to prepare it during the weekend, thus losing part of their personal time”, abounds a study published in Nature in 2022.
In general, limit points that are too early in the morning. The start of the day is conducive to in-depth work, it is counterproductive to spend them in meetings, an often “superficial” activity, explains the study (Ibid). “Many professionals work best right after waking up, probably because we lose willpower throughout the day.” A graduate of Princeton, the American Laura Vanderkam, expert in time management, invites you to do most of the important tasks on Monday and Tuesdaythe best way to ensure their execution.
Allow yourself to decline an invitation. The Canadian Liane Davey, doctor in organizational psychology, lists five scenarios: (1) you do not have time to prepare this meeting properly, (2) the people whose presence is essential have not been invited, (3) ) you do not think you are the most qualified to participate, (4) the chosen slot does not suit you (in this case send observations/notes which will feed into the meeting), (5) the majority of the points discussed do not concern you (offer to stop by at the beginning to intervene on the only point that interests you).
There is no rule requiring one-hour points. Before issuing an invitation, everyone must carefully assess the time actually needed because many people already have busy days. Do not hesitate to ask your contact who has set a time slot for you if this is really justified or if it is possible to make it shorter. When a meeting is well structured, 15 or 30 minutes maximum often does the trick.
Do not respond immediately to your messages. Constantly checking your email will reduce your ability to think. “For many of us, incoming messages take precedence over deeper tasks. Taking back control means sorting through those requests,” says Greg Smith, an American entrepreneur, to the business magazine Fast Company.
Cut out unwarranted emails. Considering that electronic messages are “a public health issue”, Ian Bogost, columnist for the American magazine The Atlantic invites everyone to stop responding to abusive emails in order to “discourage anyone from sending them”. This professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology concludes his diatribe with a touch of poetry: “We will never stop the rain of emails. But if we work together, maybe we can build some kind of shelter.”
Put an end to the gift of ubiquity
Prepare before the children wake up. “The reason mornings are so stressful is that they are bound to lead to disaster,” describes J. Stuart Ablon, a teaching psychologist at Harvard Medical School. “Going from sleep to wakefulness is the most intense, disorienting and rapid change required of us in life,” he says. in the columns of New York Times. For parents, it’s a double whammy. A pre-day before the real one. Golden rule: get up first to take care of yourself first. “In our minds, as parents, it seems logical that we can prepare while [nos enfants] do, but logic and parenting do not always go hand in hand,” points out American psychologist Jerry Bubrik.
Farewell THE mutitasking anything goes. More organization at home, less dispersion at the office. Are you seen as the king of multitasking in the open space? Come down from your pedestal. “To produce at your optimal level, you need to work for long periods of time with full concentration on a single task,” suggests Cal Newport, associate professor of science at Georgetown University in his best-selling book Deep Work (2017, Alisio). Do you have energy and ambition but are not a candidate for burnout? In his new work Slow Productivity, this bestselling author recommends following these three principles: doing fewer things at the same time, adopting a less intense pace and “being obsessed with the quality of what you produce.” According to him, too many tasks kills productivity. But how do you get the message across to your own manager or employer? It’s not about saying no to everything that’s asked of you, but about highlighting your workload and being transparent with your superior about your available time, explains the researcher.
In the evening, we cut. Once the day is over, unless there is an emergency, we do not interrupt the aperitif to check and respond to emails or get back on the computer after dinner. In which case, warns Cal Newport, this can result in a drop in your efficiency the next day, you will end up accomplishing less things than if you had respected this break time the day before. “It is often our own anxieties which play the role of the most ferocious taskmaster,” the researcher recently analyzed in an interview with New York Times.
Delegate intelligently. In the office, learning to delegate can save you from many situations. “No complex activity can be carried out by one and the same person” (Stop manager bashing, Pearson, 2023). Well organized, understood by the delegatee and transparent (you can relieve yourself of a task simply because it bores you, as long as you say it frankly), delegation is an investment in the future: “it is by entrusting a responsibility that we discern someone’s abilities. This makes it possible to initiate an evolution and the formation of added value for the individual as well as for the company” (Ibid).
Take a step back
Learn to master the chief complainers of the open space. To emerge unscathed from endless negotiations with the most resistant, Phil M. Jones, a recognized expert in sales techniques, believes that it is “imperative to maintain control of the conversation”, the person who holds the reins always being the one who ask the questions. “The worst thing to do when faced with an objection is to respond with a counterargument […] instead you can effectively address each of these common objections by taking a curious approach” (The words that sell, Eyrolles). To the interlocutor who tells you “I don’t have the necessary budget at the moment”, retort for example: “what makes you say that?”. “By asking this question, you are pushing him to take responsibility and explain what he really meant.”
Stop ruminating. Once outside the door of your home, it is not always easy to leave the annoyances of the day behind us. However, “ruminating about work can make it difficult to fall asleep and sleep, and harm our mood and our mental health”, described in the Wall Street Journal, Verena C. Haun, professor at the Julius Maximilian University in Wüzburg, Germany. This specialist in issues of psychological detachment at work suggests following a simple ritual to mark the transition between the office and free time: for example, washing a cup or changing clothes.
Read, read and read (fiction preferably). “Many business leaders say they are too busy to get lost in a book, but they could benefit from unleashing their imagination,” argues Margaret Heffernan, professor at the University of Bath School of Management. Drawing on the research of neuroscientists, this British featured in an article in Financial Times the many virtues of reading which notably improves “our ability to concentrate, broken by technology”. But, she warns, “forget self-help books, just reading is self-help in action.”
While we should not ignore the structural reasons that can contribute to unhappiness and burnout in certain organizations, are we really all “underwater” all the time? The Swedish sociologist Roland Paulsen threw a wrench in the pond in 2014 with his concept of “empty work”, that is to say the time spent by each employee on personal activities (discussions at the coffee machine, research on internet…), which international statistics estimate at two hours per day on average. According to Roland Paulsen, “paid work is an unequal institution”. “While some, often those who are the least well paid, have to do more and more without even having the possibility of taking a five-minute break, others can still remain inactive,” says the Swede. And to conclude: “If the average intensification of work is indeed a reality, it does not concern everyone”.
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