Sisyphus Effect

3/20/2008

Sisyphus was a character in Greek mythology. He was a king punished in the Tartarus by being cursed to roll a huge boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll down again, and repeat this throughout eternity.

Sound familar to your life?

It could happen to all of us, you wake up pumped and ready for the day. Your on track to getting everything done. You bang out your to-do list only adding things that you know need to get done. You fire up your e-mail client and start responding to the messages. You look up and realise that you've already spent 45 minutes in e-mail - getting sidetracked by links, sites, and bright lights flashing from your computer screen.

You phone rings, someone wants to set up a meeting with you, or ask you a bunch of pointless questions like can we accept sacagawea quarters as payment for an order? Your boss now wants a copy of the TPS report because the last one was a corrupted file.

Geez, it never stops. You've been at work for three hours and haven't gotten any of your major projects done because your putting out fires and helping others with their to-do list but not getting yours done.

Here is how we fix the above mentioned headache:

Rid Yourself of Interruptions

At some point throughout your day put up a Do Not Disturb sign. Power down your phone for fifteen minutes, close out your e-mail client.

Learn To Say No

Learn to say no, or not right now. Sometimes you have to just call a timeout and not sign up to do everything. I have a friend that simply loves to play racketball. The games take nearly an hour to finish sometimes. I enjoy playing once a month or so but I can't possibly play everyday like he wants. I simply can't allot an hour to playing racketball each day, I just have to say no to him twenty or more times per month.

Identify

Identify your time wasters and find a solution to how your going to work on getting your time back from those who demand it unneedingly sometimes.