You’ve followed all the “rules” about planning your day and work hard to keep it on track. But no matter what you do, it seems like every day turns out the same — you’re there for ten hours, gobble down lunch at your desk and complete five (or none!) of the twenty items on your to do list. It can be depressing. In the long term it will wear on you and and make you less effective overall.

Today’s hectic business environment is a tough one. Not only do you have to get your work done, you have to help your team achieve its goals. But between task and team member interruptions — not to mention those unexpected calls from the boss — your work day can be a very hectic one.

There is light at the end of the tunnel. Before you go any further, take some time to assess what’s going right and what’s going wrong with your day. You can’t fix what you don’t know, so the best thing to do is find out. The way to do that is to understand what’s happening during your day. And you can find that out by using a Time Log to track your time. Get your Time Log here.

Here’s how to use it.

• Track your time daily for one week. At the end of each day, analyze what happened that day. See if patterns exist around certain times of the day, people or tasks. Make a note of what you discovered.
• At the end of the week, look at all of your time log sheets along with the notes you captured. What does it tell you? Are there special times of the day you are particularly busy? Certain people that require more of your time than others? Tasks that always take longer than the time you allocated?
• Adjust your schedule to accommodate what you discovered. Set up your day to allow extra unplanned time during the periods you found that were very busy. Allocate more time for the people and tasks that require it according to your schedule.

The key is to modify your schedule according to what’s happening in your day so you get more productivity out of it. Pay close attention to the things that are derailing your schedule and adjust accordingly. It will help your work life be a whole lot more satisfying and less stressful.

Your entire team can do this exercise. Then you can help each other identify the hot spots and manage them to achieve team goals.

This topic was originally featured in my weekly Team Building Tips newsletter. Are you a subscriber? Get timely team building tips and tools straight to your email box by signing up here.

I listened to your podcast on “Don’t be afraid of conflict” because my staff are not getting along. I am the director of a very small child care center. There are four women besides myself on staff. All of these ladies are between 26 and 32 years of age. Two work in the same class & the other two work in separate classes but work on lesson plans together & have become good friends. One group thinks the other group could do more to help when the number of children in their class drops during the day. We have all discussed this and I thought it was resolved, but there is still underlying conflict. I am exhausted from the subtle discord. What can I do? We need to work together for the good of the children we serve. We are not trying to make big bucks here. The school is using the child care center to draw new teachers with young families. I just don’t know what else to do. Quite frankly, I don’t want to work in that same atmosphere for the next year! Any practical help to get my staff together would be appreciated.

The Team Doc Says…

Unresolved conflict really can undermine efforts to move your team to high performance. You absolutely must get to the root of this issue, even if that means letting a staff member go. Since you are the director, the buck stops with you. You absolutely must take action to get this corrected.

I think a meeting of all staff is in order. Lay out your issues with what is going on. Be specific. Don’t just say the conflict has to stop. Cite examples of exactly what you saw or heard. Hold team members accountable for their behavior. Explain what will happen to the staff member if the situation occurs again.

You don’t really have much choice here. One thing I would be very concerned about is the impact to the children in the classes. Little people are very smart. You can bet they see what is going on and feel the effects of it too.

What about you reader? Got any good suggestions? Please share in the comments.

I’m a very experienced manager in retail in the UK. In a recent performance review its been pointed out that I’m not a team player. This has come as a shock to me but I do realize that its what other people say I have to consider. I’m currently dealing with many performance issues within my store. I have completed a feedback exercise and am building this into a development plan for myself. I just need some help to turn this perception of me around , whilst at the same time being firm with the non performance issues and certainly not looking like I’m backing in to people. I am a strong leader, I’m working with a team of managers who on the whole have less experience than me. how can I turn my perception around?

The Team Doc Says…

The short answer here is that your actions will help turn around people’s perceptions of you. It’s really hard for people to change the way they behave and I congratulate you for taking action. To ensure you are staying on track with your new behaviors, make sure you take some time at the end of each day to look back and analyze what went well that day and what you could have done better. Don’t be too hard on yourself — we all make mistakes. Just jump back in and work to do better the next time.

I also want to address what happened to you. Feedback should never come as a shock to anyone. I think it’s sad that you had to find this out at your review. That’s a really poor management practice on your supervisor’s part. You could make some efforts to manage this going forward by asking for feedback at regular intervals. Better yet, you could demonstrate the right way to give feedback by practicing it with your own team of managers. Here is a good guide to giving feedback.

And remember, the best feedback is given at the appropriate time and is specific and actionable. I suspect the feedback you got was neither of these.

Good luck and let me know how this works out for you. Anyone else have suggestions to offer? Please leave a comment.

I have an issue with getting my employees to follow the rules in the office. I started in my position 8 months ago as a team leader. It was a unique situation. I was working the floor along with everyone else (I’m the youngest team member). Ive worked for the company for four years now and we have never had an manager in the office. When I came in as team leader, I had to start enforcing rules that were introduced by our new practice administrator. Before this we had the rules but they were never enforced by anyone. I’ve gotten part of my staff to understand the importance in this but they are also the newest staff its just the older staff that have been here for awhile that don’t want to follow the rules. What do I do?

The Team Doc Says…

Your older team members might just look at the rules as something they can choose to do since they never bothered before you came and to them things seemed to run just fine. Does that make them not following rules the right thing to do? No, but it could put it in perspective for you.

What I suggest you do is to first take a look at the rules and see if they add value to the business or the work that your team has to accomplish. Are they rules for rules sake? Are they required rules to meet some type of regulation? Are they rules that help the company run better?

Once you’ve taken a look at those rules, talk with your practice manager about any rule that isn’t adding value and isn’t required by law. Just get rid of those.

Then you need to educate your team on the rules that are left. Make sure you identify why the rules are important and what will happen if your team members don’t follow the rules. Listen carefully to feedback from your team while you are having this discussion. Make sure you address the team member concerns. Follow through on implementation and take action as necessary.

What do you think reader? Please share your thoughts by leaving a comment.

We have recently been having some problems with things not getting done properly. We don’t know exactly which person to “correct” as everyone does everything. They all schedule appointments some, feed the animals some, etc. So, when we find a pet left without water or an appointment scheduled incorrectly, we don’t know who made the mistake. We’ve tried just speaking of the error to the group with “I don’t know who did this and it really doesn’t matter, but we do want everyone to try to do better…”. But, some become defensive and start pointing fingers….

The Team Doc Says…

You are finding out the hard way that when everyone’s in charge, no one is in charge. And no one can be held accountable under that type of system.

You need to define roles for any given day in your clinic. Assign people to the role for that day and then hold them accountable for those tasks. You may have tasks you need to assign backup for because of the nature of the task, but use caution in assigning more than one person.

You may also need to set up a quality control / quality assurance process for some tasks. This can be as simple as having a check in sheet in specific areas of the clinic. For example, if water needs to be checked in cages on a regular basis, you could create a sheet showing the times it needs to be checked and affix it to the cage. Each time your team member checks it, she can sign it to indicate she did indeed check the water. If it gets missed, guess who’s held accountable? Exactly! And no excuses are allowed.

This is going to take you a bit of time to organize, but it will be worth it in the long run. And it will help your team too. When people are assigned a role, they can take pride in completing it. It helps them shine. And they don’t have to worry about someone pointing a finger at them because it’s assumed they did something wrong.

What about you reader? Have more advice to give? Please leave a comment.