Time Management

If you don’t have time to finish reading this blog post, it may be because you have to rush off to a meeting. Perhaps you started your day with a meeting, which went long and ruined your schedule, which is why you’re already running late for the next meeting. Meetings, meetings, meetings. They seem to be everywhere. And they are.

Meetings may be a necessary part of office life—but they are also perhaps one of the most dreaded. Few people really enjoy meetings, and even those who find them useful in general will usually admit that they tend to take way more time than they should.

Office professionals everywhere feel trapped by the struggling economy. The fear of losing one’s job has people behaving in ways they never imagined, from working incredibly long hours to doing just about anything to look good in front of the boss. For many office professionals, this means staying late at work and not leaving until the boss has exited the building.

After sending out countless resumes and poignant cover letters, your finally landed an interview. Congratulations. Now it’s time to focus on the interview. You study the company. You pick up your best suit from the dry cleaners. You rehearse your questions and answers. You listen to uplifting music on your headphones. You’re  ready. You’re not even nervous. You walk in full of confidence.

There is no underestimating the importance of time management. How we spend our time at the office defines us as professionals, and those who are not efficient time managers create frustration for themselves and others. However, time management issues can be rectified, and most of them are surprisingly easy to fix with a little discipline. The trick is to do the difficult things first.

• Should Pregnancy be Treated as a Disability in the Workplace? [WSJ.com]
• Tips for Getting a Promotion This Year [US News]
• Ways to Procrastinate Effectively [Jobacle]
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Everything in life is relative, so it’s difficult to convince office professionals who suffer from depression that they have many things to be happy about—like having a job, for instance. Depression, of course, is an incredibly complicated beast, where our emotional, physical, intellectual, mental, ancestral and medical capacities all verge together in our head like a Mississippi delta of our personal human condition.

You know the type. That colleague who just can’t get to the point. They visit you at your cubicle, apparently oblivious to the fact that you’re busy, and drone on and on about their terrible commute sitting next to a crying baby on the bus, or how their mother-in-law is driving them crazy or how the new Chipotle downstairs never has enough Tabasco sauce available. You politely nod your head, saying you have loads of work to do, sighing about how busy you are, and they just stand there, yapping away.

If you’re looking for a new job, you probably have already learned that online job sites have replaced the old-fashioned classified ads. So it is a good idea to spend some time on the major job sites. However, experts—like the one who wrote this article—warn that you shouldn’t make the mistake of spending too much time on them.