42. Gain Control of Your Life: Five Stages of Managing Workflow

First, let’s take horizontal management. To gain control of your projects and commitments, and ultimately your life, is to deal with them through a five-stage process.. Collect things that command your attention. Process what they mean and what to do about them. Organize the results which you… . Review as options for what you choose to Do .

The method is straightforward and is usually what most people do to accomplish things. But, what you need to do is to improve how they handle each of these stages. Most people are unable to collect all the things or process them well; others are bad at organizing results, while others fail to review them consistently. If you are unable to do any of these first four stages well, then what you decide to do may not be the best choice.

Managing actions” means making appropriate choices about what to do at any point in time. This may sound obvious, but the truth is, many people have no idea what next step they need to take to accomplish a project or a commitment. Most of the time, the real problem is not lack of time, but the lack of clarity or definition about what a project is, and what actions are required to do it.

Your company’s total rewards strategy should also be unique to your company’s specific situation and business objectives. A company’s organizational design also affects how a total rewards strategy should work. A highly centralized company may need to provide similar types of rewards across business units and variable pay linked to overall company performance. By contrast, a virtual organization, in which there are few boundaries between the company, suppliers and customers.