As a Hollywood assistant, it feels like we’re at someone’s beck and call. It’s like indentured servitude, but less pay. We’re flooded with the minutia of daily tasks.
Unfortunately, this pulls us away from the important to-do items on your desk.
And the projects we actually care about. Versus, say, scheduling your Boss’s trip to New York six months from now.
So can we reclaim our time to work on what’s important, without telling your boss and their clients to shut the hell up, look it up themselves, or to leave us alone?
What steps can we take to free up time and take control of the high-impact activities that we can never seem to get to?
It’s simple really:
Pick Our High-Impact “To-Do’s”
That’s the first thing we do when we get in the office.
Easy, right?
Er… or not much. Why?
I noticed with myself and with most other assistants, it’s not that we don’t know what we have to do the next day. There’s a monster to-do list, along with our call lists, emails at various stages of appointments, submissions to make, and regular email correspondences to return.
We have all these “to-do’s” but we don’t prioritize them.
We don’t assign value, or we assign value based on the needs of others, not ourselves.
Part of why we do this is our environment. We get sucked into distractions because people expect answers instantaneously. And instant answers are easy to find, so we feel like we’re actually being productive.
However, we don’t learn anything valuable with easy answers. We don’t build any value for others.
We can’t turn off the distractions. They’re inherent in this industry. But we can temporarily shut it down, even if it’s only for certain portions of the day.
For me, these times are:
- The first hour I’m in the office
- At 5:30 p.m., when there’s consistently a lull in activity (the exact time can vary from office to office).
Work and Distraction Are Conscious Decisions
This requires the conscious decision (writing it down if necessary): “this is what I’m going to do the moment I sit down.”
My work flow:
- I already make it a point not to schedule anything before 10 a.m. for my Bosses
- Scan emails for anything truly urgent. If no one’s going to get fired or die, I ignore it.
- Then I get to work on what I said I’m going to do.
However, sometimes my Boss beats me into the office. By the time I’m ready to kick ass on my own tasks he is ready to roll calls and send submissions.
This doesn’t excuse me, however.
I take care of what he needed immediately, but queue up any other tasks that aren’t “this-minute-urgent.” Then I back to my plan of attack as soon as possible, and stick with it for as long as I can delay everything else.
I set a time and stick to it. Even it’s only 20 minutes – that’s 20 minutes to work on something meaningful, which is better than spending 100% of my day reacting to what everyone else is doing.
Here are other tips to carve out that “me” time so you can get to your one or two important “to-do’s”:
- If I have interns coming in, their assignments are ready to be delegated before they get into the office, with clear instructions on what I expect, when, and at what point to check in regarding their status. I DON’T wait until they’re standing around playing ANGRY BIRDS on their phones before finding them something to do. Otherwise I’ve wasted my time and theirs.
- When it’s time for the deep work, I must make the conscious choice TO NOT GET DISTRACTED. I turn off the email notification, close out of Deadline, and put an “Away” auto-responder on AIM. I still have to actively remind myself to do these things each time I sit at the desk.
- For all “minutia email” (confirming appointments and follow-up emails and submissions): if it’s not life-or-death (and it rarely is, contrary to what the whiny assistant may be moaning about), it can wait. Tougher than it sounds, I know — there’s that industry pressure to get things done fast fast fast. But I want to do the meaningful work, and make learning a priority, not my reaction speed.
- Anything not pertinent to what I’m learning, I remove it from my desk or close it on my computer.
- Before I leave for lunch, I’ve already decided what I’ll work on when I return.
How Do You Pick Your “To-Do’s”?
I have two criteria:
- It must require deep thought.
- By doing it, it improves my own hard skill set.
For the last year, my important “to-do’s” revolved around learning contracts.
If you’re in development, it might be a tricky section of notes and the difficult challenge of expressing in writing why an aspect of the story doesn’t work.
Why are these criteria so important?
This is where personal growth happens. In the things that are hard, that require thought and patience and deliberation. This work separates the people who come off a desk with tangible skills, and people who developed better soft skills everyone else already has (they schedule fast, they respond fast to emails, they’re good at moving around electronic bits of information.)
If everyone can do it, the skill isn’t in demand.
If you want to be in demand, you have to learn the hard stuff.
The harder the work, the deeper the thought required to solve a problem. The deeper the thought required, the easier it is to allow yourself to get distracted.
Remember, we allow ourselves to get distracted. You are not distracted, it’s not something that happens to us. We must take responsibility for what we do with our times. And when it comes to distraction, we let ourselves slip.
We give ourselves permission: “oh, I had to respond to that email! Oh, I had to handle that call right away.” Really? Did we really need to set that meeting that’s going to happen a month from now this very minute?
In the moment, it seems like an innocuous thing – to pause the hard work to handle the small minutia. We have to look at this over the life of our career, however.
Over 20 or 30 years, who do we want to be: the person who worked on skills of value every chance they got, or the person who’s really good at email?
#####
Photo Credit: State Farm
{ 2 comments… add one }