Finding Time by Clearing Crisis Clutter - 9 Tips to Handle Crisis Junkies and Safeguard Your Time

Time management is only as effective as your ability to maintain control of your time. Others' crises may undermine your plans. If so, you need to develop techniques to respond without endangering your job or alienating your colleagues. Try these nine tips in your work life and also observe how helpful they can be in your personal life, as well.

Crisis Tip One: Refuse to be swept along by others' urgency. Urgency is a key weapon of strong personalities. Don't make their crisis your crisis. When you allow yourself time to consider your response carefully, you demonstrate that you alone are in charge of your time.

Crisis Tip Two: Observe and Evaluate 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!

Crisis Tip Three: Lower the drama of the moment. You defuse time urgency by summarizing the situation calmly, in accurate but less highly charged terms.

Crisis Tip Four: Also, affirm that you understand them. When others feel heard, they instinctively relax and take more time to listen to your ideas.

Crisis Tip Five: Broaden the perspective. Strategizing from multiple vantage points reduces the tunnel vision that urgency promotes. Identify areas of consensus. You can empathize while retaining a balanced view.

Crisis Tip Six: Offer the choices that align with your time frame. Succeed through identifying everyone's baseline needs and negotiating accordingly. Clearly state your parameters, so that your own projects remain on schedule.

Crisis Tip Seven: Allow others their responses. 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.

Crisis Tip Eight: Remain focused on your areas of control. Spend whatever time is necessary to clarify what you will and will not do. Specify what you feel comfortable doing, and the amount of time you are willing to spend doing it. The more clearly you communicate, the more you encourage others to share ideas and genuinely participate.

Crisis Tip Nine: As you change your part, prepare yourself for other aspects of interactions to shift. Your relationships often are contracts that have never been verbally acknowledged. For example, as you become less available at the last-minute, others may be called upon to help. Or you may be asked 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'.

As roles realign, new possibilities emerge. As you become more skilled with negotiating, you will find that things run more smoothly and you regain power over your productivity. What is your next step to find more time?

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