What Doing Your Core Work Actually Means.
By: Carl Pullein
Tags: Core Work, Work, Time Management, Productivity, Focus

Throughout my working life I have worked as a hotel duty manager, a car salesperson, a lawyer and a teacher. Quite a variety of occupations. And a common thread throughout my working life is I have always prioritised my core work first.

You see, no matter what work you do, there will always be emergencies — those little things that come up unexpectedly — that will throw you off your plan for the day. I suspect starting my working life in hotels was one of the best educational experiences I could have wished for. Whether you worked in reception, the restaurant, the kitchen or the bar, every day would throw up some sort of emergency and more often than not it would not be a single emergency but a cascade of emergencies one after the other.

The first thing you learn is never panic. Panicking will leave you exhausted physically and emotionally and you will likely make the wrong decisions. Instead, you stop and decide how best to resolve the emergency. Do you need to do something or do you inform the duty manager? And if you can do something, do it. After all, the customer comes first (that’s the golden rule in hotels)

Knowing an emergency will happen, when I started my shift I always began the same way. When I worked in the bar, my first task was always to make sure we had the right stock on the shelves and in the fridges. If something was low or unavailable, you just knew a VIP would come in and want to order it when the bar was full of customers. So, I would do a quick stock-take and if I needed anything — tonic water, ginger ale or Chivas Regal Royal Salute, I would call down to stores and ask them to send up the required stock. I did that in my first fifteen minutes on coming onto shift.

If I was doing the day shift, I would ask the chef if there was anything on the menu out of stock. Knowing this before I began my shift helped me prevent any problems with disappointed customers.

And if I was doing the day shift, I would also do the required shelf and fridge cleaning first. Leaving that until later in the day meant it would not happen.

When I went into car sales, I soon figured out that the best way to improve my sales was to contact customers who had bought a new car three years ago. In the UK, as in many countries, cars less than three years old do not need a government safety certificate. The hassle of booking your car in for a test, and the worry that something expensive needed replacing caused many customers to think about changing their car at the three-year mark. So, I would get the print-out from admin every week and each morning, before anything else, I would call the customers to see if I could interest them in changing their car.

Next up, part of a sales persons job was to check the cars on the forecourt to make sure they were clean and had the right information in their windows. As this was part of my job, that is what I would do next.

Getting these core tasks done first meant I had the flexibility later in the day to deal with any emergencies that came up. Customers who were not happy with the car I had sold them, problems with orders not being delivered from the factory on time, and delays getting a car through it’s PDI (pre-delivery inspection). They always came up.

And when I began working as lawyer, I soon figured out I needed to review cases that were coming up in the next month. If I didn’t do those reviews, something would be missing and that would create a lot of emergencies.

A big part of my work as a lawyer was making sure the right legal documents came in on time and to chase other lawyers if they were being slow. So, that is what I did first. Make sure all my current cases were up to date and things were arriving. If they were not, either send the required letter or make the necessary phone calls.

Had I left that work to later in the day, the crises of the day would take over and my core work would never get done.

In the Time Sector Course, I stress the importance of identifying your core work. The work that you are paid to do. Most of the emergencies that get thrown at us do not form part of your core work unless you work in customer services. So handling emergencies, is extra work and it is that extra work that drains you. It stops you from doing the job you were hired to do. So, finding ways to reduce the risk of emergencies occurring in the first place will help you to stay on top of your work.

Once you know what your core work is — the tasks that will give you the biggest impact on your work — you can then prioritise those tasks before you get stuck doing something else. Knowing what you need to do each day before you start will keep you focused on that core work and prevent you being distracted by other, noisier voices and urgencies that will pull you away from those core tasks.

And for the most part, those emergencies can wait an hour or so. I’ve found that if I get an ‘emergency’ email or phone call, all I need is to acknowledge the contact, and say, I’ll look in to it get back to you later today. 99% of the time, the fact that the person with the emergency knows someone is taking care of it is enough. That task will then go into my inbox and I will continue to get my core work done.

Once my core work is done, I can then turn my attention to the crisis and give it 100% attention and focus. That’s a much better mindset to be in instead of worrying about when you will have time to do the work you are paid to do. That’s when panic and stress sets in and that leads to overwhelm and exhaustion.

So, if you want to gain control of your day. To be able to make sure you get you most important work done, then take some time to list out your core work. The work that you were hired to do. Prioritise that every day and do it first. Once that is done, you will find yourself in a much better place to handle anything else being thrown at you.

If you want to learn more about the Time Sector System, I wrote a blog post about it here. And you can see how it works on a day-to-day basis in this YouTube video I did recently.

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