“The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.”
~Henry David Thoreau
The less people you need to go through in order to get your work done properly the better. In John’s case, he would spend a lot of time searching out people in order to complete his work tasks. After some analysis, he found out that the people who he needed to interact with fell into 3 groups:
- The person who makes the work request
- The people who hold necessary information for completing the work task
- The proof reader
These 3 groups could then be expanded to encompass a number of different people:
- The person who makes the work request
- Supervisor
- Engineer
- External party
- The people who hold necessary information for completing the document
- Engineers
- Service people
- Technicians
- Document controller
- Project Manager
- External parties
- The proof reader
- Engineers
- Dealers
- External parties
People who have nothing to do with helping you complete your main work tasks should be removed from this list. For instance, you may find that every week the payroll clerk or receptionist is calling you to look for a document on the server they might have misplaced.
You might feel like you are being mean by rejecting to help them, but the result of getting side tracked while in the middle of a major task is a loss of focus and longer work time.
If you insist on helping someone with something, let them know that you are busy and will only be able to help them at the end of your task.
While this prevents you from getting distracted, it also has the secondary effect of potentially deflecting minor requests in future.
For requests that are unimportant, people usually don’t bother following up if you insist that you can only help later. Also, people who are impatient will eventually get the idea that trying to get immediate help from you is usually pointless and will stop asking you altogether in future.
While it may not be possible to eliminate all people, it is possible to create a quick reference chart that tells you who you should go to whenever you need something. This is particularly useful when you are used to interacting with a lot of people and helps reduce the amount of time you need to spend thinking about where to get a piece of information.
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