Timothy Ferris offers an interesting proposition in his book entitled The 4-Hour Work Week.  He calls it the “Low Information Diet.”  Here’s the idea …

Most of us have heard the expression, “Work expands to fill the time allotted for it.”  What that means is, if you’re willing to work 80 hours a week, you’ll find activities to consume those 80 hours!  Ferris has an interesting solution — develop “selective ignorance”.  In other words, lose the not-so-urgent information that comes at us each day.

Here are some ideas to help make the local workforce (including you) more efficient and effective:

• Batch Your Emails … Ferris calls most emails “manufactured emergencies”.  He suggests we would all do just fine checking our email only twice a day.  Ferris recommends you do it just before lunch and once more at about 4 pm.  He ABSOLUTELY opposes checking your email first thing in the morning because he says this just scrambles your thinking and creativity.
• Batch Your Phone Calls … this is a lot like the emails.  According to Susan Ward (www.about.com), a recognized small business expert, “the telephone is supposed to be a business tool, not an intrusive tyrant …”  She recommends you batch your phone calls, leaving a message on the voice mail to tell callers you will be checking your voice mails just before lunch and again at the end of the day.  That way, callers have an idea when they can expect a call back.
• Empower Others … give others authority to make decisions and you will find they interrupt you less, leaving you more time to be productive.
• Single Task … that is, quit multi-tasking.  Ferris points out that divided attention results in more frequent interruptions.  First Monday (www.firstmonday.org) published a report from the Intel Corporation indicating that people switch projects every 11 minutes.  It takes about 25 minutes for them to return to the original task and recover their train of thought.  By staying on task until the task is finished, members of the workforce would save a lot of time.
• Not-To-Do Lists … one other point Ferris makes is that the “not-to-do list” may be equally as important as the “to do list”.  If you know who you are, where you’re going, and how to get there, anything that does not fit should be cut from the list.  Author Jim Collins says you can get the team together, make a list of the things they have to do, rate those things in order of importance, and get rid of the bottom 20 percent.

Okay, nothing’s perfect, including these suggestions but … the bottom line is, Ferris could be right.  It might actually be possible to do more of the really important things each day by working less and focusing more.  That’s not a bad deal, is it?  We might just give it a try …