Getting Caught Up and Falling Behind

For most things I’m very good at getting things done on schedule, but I find that when it comes to my online reading, such as blogs and forums, I’m forever behind. I try to set aside time daily to visit the blogs and forums that I have bookmarked, but business takes priority. Come the end of the day I often find that I didn’t have a chance to browse, post and comment as I had hoped.

I’m more of a morning person so the morning is when I get the most work done. The 20/80 principle applies here, most of my productivity happens in the first 20% of my day. It’s also when I’m most alert so this is the ideal time to do my online reading. Problem is, it’s also the best time to take care of a lot of other “priority” items as well.

Each morning I come into the office, turn on my computer open my email and… well, as soon as I open email, that pretty much seals the rest of my day. I try to provide responses to clients that have emailed overnight or early in the morning, usually those in other time zones that also get an early start on their days. As a customer service issue I like to take care of all emails as quickly so my clients are not sitting around wondering if anybody is here to take care of them. Some emails generate tasks that can be taken care of later, so I set up all those tasks as things to today.

Once I’ve vanquished my inbox I then move over to my news alerts and browse through them, reading articles and news stories that seem important. After that I go to my task box to see if there are any tasks pending to be reviewed. I want to get these taken care of so my team can do their jobs when they come in.

By this time it’s about 11 AM (I start around 6:30) and I’m in full work mode, taking care of tasks, managing projects, etc. By the time my day slows down it’s about time to head home. More times than not, this is when I jump onto the forums and blogs, but by now my heart is just not in it. I find myself skimming more than reading and just going through the motions looking for something that really peaks my interesting, while passing up a lot of stuff that I would normally want to read.

Many times I get to the end of the day and I didn’t even have time to browse causing my unread blog and forum posts to pile up. By the time I get a chance to go through them there is simply just too many and to say that I skim is really injustice to the amount of thought that goes into the process of skimming. I pretty much just clear things out and think that tomorrow will be different now that I’m caught up. If only!

This week I’m going to try and hit the blogs and forums BEFORE I do anything else, see if that works. Do you find that there are things that you know you need or should do but often keep getting pushed off because other things take precedence?