The Resilience Advantage goes well beyond recovery to find way to decrease stressful situations before they occur. To that end, lets kick off the year by looking at some better strategies for 2 key activities you’ll want to do this year to improve performance—Email management and making time to think.

Be a Better Emailer: Getting your head around this monster just involves small incremental steps:

• Don’t use the best energy time of your day (usually the morning but not for everyone) to spend all your time doing email.
• If you feel you must review email first thing when you get going, set a timer for 15 minutes and just go through the critical few. The rest can wait until you can build time in for a full review.
• When sending an email, place the objective of your email in the subject line. For example: “Re: Morning Discussion on Budget Surplus: New Information Available”

Time to Think: Time is always at a premium but taking time to think can never be a bad idea. Here are 3 ways to make time for thinking:

• Resolutions don’t work, because they require “will power” which is too difficult to sustain over long periods of time. It is far easier to develop a new habit by creating systems that automate processes for you. For example, block out times in your schedule that are reserved for reading, talking to key stakeholders, or watching a video that prompts your thinking.
• Know what you want to think about: Your mind will want to flutter between ideas and it is better to focus on the critical few. What are the most important ideas that will drive your business success? Make a mental note of them each day and you’ll find that your brain works on them unconsciously leading to good solutions that “seem to come out of nowhere.”
• Find the time intervals: That ride into work or ride back home can be a good time for thinking. Turn off your phone for those 30 minutes and allow yourself some time to think. It may involve preparing or reviewing your day but those few minutes can be the catch up time that breeds new ideas.

Send me some of your best ideas for these topics above and we’ll get them out in a subsequent “Resilient Wednesday.”

© Richard Citrin, All rights reserved, 2019

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