Take control of your engagement at work

Employee engagement is in a pretty dismal state. A staggering 87 per cent of employees are not engaged in their work according to Gallup. The common narrative that emerges these days is engagement is more or less out of the individual's hands - that it has more to do with the organisation, the job description, the company culture - things, in other words, that aren't determined by the employee.

While this is true to some extent, it's a mistake to relinquish all responsibility for your personal engagement in your job. There are things EAs can do to engage themselves better in their work.

Describing their research in Harvard Business review, Michael Parke and Justin Weinhardt say that personal engagement can be boosted by something as simple as planning properly for the day ahead. If you expect to be interrupted often, plan your day around this and don't create a huge list of things you need to do by the end of the day - you're only going to be frustrated by the fact that you can't complete them due to all the interruptions. If you don't expect to be interrupted, make a to-do list and do your best to complete it in the day. The small emotional boost you'll get from completing the tasks you set out to do will help you feel more engaged in your work.

Defeating distraction

It can be a nightmare trying to get work done on those days where your brain is acting like a monkey jumping around inside your head. But there are many strategies EAs can use to tame their minds and focus on the task at hand. For example:

• Create boundaries - don't allow yourself to look at certain websites or check your phone for notifications at certain times of the day.

• Stay away from chatty co-workers - if you constantly find yourself talking to a friend at work, distance yourself when you really need to knuckle down.

Whatever the strategies you adopt, don't expect your concentration to be limitless. You will eventually get distracted, that much is certain. Don't get frustrated - if you find yourself on Facebook, Youtube, or thinking that now is the time you should really read that article your friend suggested, notice this fact and get out of the spiral as soon as you can. Pulling your attention back to the task at hand is the most important skill to learn.

Beating yourself up over "an inability to concentrate" is no help. Almost everybody can't concentrate - the ones that are nonetheless productive are just the people that can pull back once they've gone off track. So in a way, distraction is something you might never conquer, but you don't need to - the skill is re-focussing quickly after you've become distracted. Keep that in mind, and you'll begin to find it easier to point your mind in the direction you want it to go.

How to write readable emails

Emails are a part of the modern work environment that aren't going anywhere. As a form of communication, they're incredibly convenient but also very time consuming for that same reason.

There are ways to make the daily email buildup easier to manage, however, for yourself and your colleagues - writing emails that are easy to read, for example. Here are two tips for doing so:

1. Think about the key reason for the email before you start typing

Working out the core message of what you're sending an email for can be an incredibly useful way to clarify. Diving straight into composition is almost always a mistake - doing your thinking on the page means you either have to make significant edits once your fingers have finished blazing, your recipient has to read through acres of text to get to a point that could have been said in a few lines.

2. Eliminate irrelevant information

A clear email is one that only contains information that's relevant to the point or the purpose of the email. To take an absurd example, there would be no need to include your thoughts on international trade treaties in an email asking someone their thoughts on a pamphlet's colour scheme. You can pull this example back to earth and think about what's important to the message of the email. If it's not, cut it. Your recipient will thank you for it.

Is it time to break your smartphone addiction?

Smartphones are truly wonders of modern technology. To think that the slab in your pocket is many times more powerful than the computers used to a rocket to the moon in the 1960s is mind boggling.

But with great power comes great responsibility, and for many of us, it's a responsibility we sometimes don't live up to. As soon as we sense a moment of downtime, do you instinctively reach towards your phone? If so, you might want to think about whether your smartphone habit is one worth breaking.

You can start by setting dedicated 'phone times' - moments in the day where you'll consciously check your phone, instead of habitually doing so every so often. While this might seem counterintuitive, the reasoning is fairly simple. Having set times to check can help free you from that anxious feeling of wanting to check your phone. If you can tell yourself, "everything can wait until phone time", you can get used to the idea of notifications, social posts or emails coming in without you knowing about them straight away.

It's also recommended that you turn of notifications on apps that aren't important, or at the very least, put your phone on silent. The idea is to break the chain of feeling like you need to see everything a soon as it arrives. Removing notifications will force you to check the app in question manually, and if you find you're not motivated enough to do that, chances are you didn't really value the information in the notifications that much anyway.

Three top time-management tips

One of the most important skills an EA has to have is incredible time management. The value of this can never be understated, and you should always strive to improve your skill set in this field. With that in mind, here are three tips to consider when managing your time.

1. Forget being perfect

Don't try and be perfect in your time management - you're only going to fail. Some days will be great, but others you'll get to the end of and nothing on your to-do list will have been achieved. Striving for perfection can make this experience incredibly disheartening. Dispensing with the need for perfection can take a lot of pressure off and allow you to relax.

2. Do email in bulk

Working through your emails in one or two rounds per day can do two things for your time management: it can help you stop feeling like you constantly need to check them, allowing you to focus, and it can remove the distraction that comes with emails notifying your of their arrival every few minutes.

3. Understand where you're wasting time

It can sometimes feel like the day disappears and you don't know where the time has gone. If you've accomplished a lot, this is fine, but the where nothing has been finished can be frustrating. For a few days, track your time and see how much you spend doing each task. Determine which consume the majority of your time and whether or not it's justified. The only way you can fix time wasting is to know where it's happening.

Why you should sometimes play the devil's advocate

Groupthink is a dangerous thing for a team to fall into. Think about the relationship you as an EA have with your Executive and the rest of your team. Do you/they ever push back on your Executive's ideas? If not, you should think about the value you may be able to bring by doing so more often.

Your Executive, however intelligent and experienced they may be, is not perfect. Agreeing with everything they say is counterproductive to getting them the best results. Sometimes you need to argue from the other side, if only to see clearer the weaknesses in a position. Being the devil's advocate can be a thankless and stressful task, but someone has to do it.

Perhaps the most consistently useful method of getting into the oppositional mindset is to ask yourself, "If I were an opponent of this idea, what would I say to try and defeat it? What is its Achilles heel?" If your Executive is truly confident in their position, they should have a good answer to rebut your criticisms or counterpoints.

Yet calling this action playing devil's advocate is, in some ways, a misnomer. You don't want to be contrarian just for the sake of taking the other side. The point is to explore all potentially viable avenues, as a way to understand how to strengthen the original idea or to find a better alternative.