The end of summer and turning the calendar to September signals a seasonal shift on most dairies and calf operations: silage harvest; a return to school for some employees and family members; cooling temperatures that trigger shifting work routines; and aspirations to finish projects by year-end.
According to time-management coach Anna Dearmon Kornick, the last 4 months of the year are the most productive for American workers as a whole. That’s easy to believe, yet sometimes hard to manage, when you look at the enormity of the demands of your time from September through December. Kornick offered these 5 tips for maximizing your time and finishing the year strong:
Head into the fall with a fresh perspective on your routine. Hopefully, summer brought some time for relaxation or at least out-of-routine fun for you and your family. Now that fall is here, it’s good to build more efficiency back into your schedule to maximize your time and accomplish the things on your to-do list. Kornick advised looking at specifically building more structure into your pre-work routine at home; your lunch break; and your recurring meeting schedules.
Adjust your workday around the time change. If you live in an area that observes Daylight Savings Time, the time to “fall back” can be accompanied with a sense of dread. Kornick suggested using the change to your advantage, like switching to an earlier bedtime. Be mindful, too, that co-workers, employees, and their families may struggle with the time change. In the weeks surrounding the time change, “shift your meetings later in the day to be kind to your team and yourself,” said Kornick.
Plan your schedule around your chronotype. What is a “chronotype,” you ask? It’s a biological explanation of why some people are “morning larks” and others are “night owls.” Each person’s body has a natural preference for when it prefers wakefulness and sleep. Figure out your chronotype, then revamp your fall work schedule around it, Kornick advised.
Understand what you need versus want in your routine. “What do you need to do every day, versus what you want to do every day?” posed Kornick. One efficient method to address this question was presented by Helen Korzec, a former commercial dairy manager from South Dakota who now runs Korzek Dairy Optimization LLC and is a part of the GPS Dairy Consulting team. In a recent GPS blog entry, she shared a 4-quadrant design matrix developed by Dwight D. Eisenhower. It sorts dairy tasks into: (a) Urgent and Important; (b) Not Urgent but Important; (c) Urgent but Not Important; and (d) Not Urgent and Not Important. An accompanying piece of advice: the Not Urgent/Not Important tasks probably can be delegated to others.
Set goals for Q4 and try quarterly planning. While we tend to think of yearly goals, those aspirations can be easily swallowed up as the year actually unfolds. Kornick recommended quarterly goal-setting, because it is a more realistic timeframe, and because the 4 quarters of a year also coincide well with the change of seasons.
On some dairies, simply surviving winter while keeping operations functional and animals and people safe, healthy, and productive may be realistic Q1 goals, with bigger and more advanced objectives assigned to Q2 when work and weather conditions improve. And for Q4, she suggested breaking it down a bit further, assigning deadlines for goals so they can be accomplished before the busy holiday season sets in. To help, you might consider intentionally shelving non-urgent goals or projects until Q1 or Q2 next year. That way, you can prioritize the work you really need to get done this fall without feeling guilty about not getting “everything” accomplished by the end of the year.
