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Finding Time By Clearing Crisis Clutter - 7 Tips To Handle Crisis Junkies And Safeguard Your Time
By Bests | February 9, 2008
Finding time to do your most rewarding work? What happens when strong personalities make demands on you?
Your colleagues may regularly confront you with ’surprise’ deadlines or crises. If you are not careful, they can easily sabotage your plans for your time.
How do you withstand others’ crises without endangering your job and your professional relationships?
7 Proven Tips to Stay on Track, Strengthen Relationships and Save Time
- Refuse to be swept along by others’ urgency.
- Observe and Evaluate.
- Use active listening to transfer the energy from them to you.
- Lower the drama of the moment. You defuse time urgency by summarizing the situation calmly, in accurate but less highly charged terms.
- Affirm that you understand them. When others feel heard, they instinctively relax and take more time to listen to your ideas.
- Broaden the perspective.
- Offer the choices that align with your time frame.
- Allow others their responses.
- Remain focused on your areas of control.
Urgency is a key weapon of strong personalities. Do not make their crisis your crisis. By taking time to carefully consider your response, you demonstrate that you retain full responsibility for yourself.
Examine your level of responsibility for the problem, and your stake in the outcome. With this overview, you can decide how much time to devote, if any, to solving their problem!
By re-stating their predicament in your own words, you re-frame the incident, and also:
Strategizing from multiple vantage points reduces the tunnel vision that urgency promotes. Identify areas of consensus. You can empathize while retaining a balanced view.
Succeed through identifying everyone’s baseline needs and negotiate accordingly. Clearly state your parameters, so that your own projects remain on schedule.
This may be the hardest part for you. Cultivate calmness so you can accept others’ dissatisfaction without defensiveness. This demonstrates you respect their right to their feelings and that your time priorities don’t require their approval.
Take the time to clarify your end of relationships. Specify what you feel comfortable doing, and the amount of time you are willing to spend doing it. By being clear, you encourage open communication that can lead to genuine progress.
Assimilating this in advance is excellent preparation. Your relationships are often unspoken contracts. As you change your part, prepare yourself for other aspects of interactions to shift. For example, as you become less available at the last-minute, others may be asked to help. Or you may be called upon to coordinate schedules and priorities more closely with colleagues. This might shake up your image of yourself as indispensable, or your image of others as ‘impossible’.
Ultimately, with skillful negotiating, you benefit by enjoying more productive, crisis-free time. How will you build on your success by developing still more rewarding methods for finding time?
You can continue to increase morale and productivity at work through utilizing the tips and techniques at http://www.findingtime.net/ezine.html.
When you sign up for our free Award-Winning Finding Time Ezine at http://www.findingtime.net/ezine.html, you receive a special bonus, two free articles exposing common time myths and offering ways to enhance your effectiveness.
Our retail site, http://www.findingtime.net/shopping.html, presents a full array of beautiful and functional baskets to help organize your favorite projects.
And our teleclass CDs & MP3 with transcript, available at findingtime.net/shopping.html feature hours of timely tips from Paula Eder, Ph.D, The Time Finder.
Tags: clarify boundaries, crisis, Finding time, negotiation, Paula Eder, priorities, The Time Finder
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Topics: Self Improvement |