Do more in less time. That is the only way you can get work done without drowning yourself in work day and night. Of course, as a rising executive you will always have more to do, but if you can learn the art of doing more in less time, it will bode well for you, your career, and the relationship with the near and dear ones.

When we say do more in less time, it is not about avoiding tasks, even though that may be necessary. But compressing things into shorter intervals of time.  It is about both efficiency and effectiveness.

Here some Do’s and Don’ts to Do More in Less Time:

1. Plan

To do more in less time, you will need to plan thoroughly and execute flawlessly.  A plan need not be a long time or a detailed project plan. A one-page SoaP (Solution on a Page) will help. Similarly, a Checklist may help.  While the plan itself is but an aid, visualizing the approach and having a plan of attack to address a particular issue or a work task is a highly productive technique.

Meghan Watson, a program manager for digital transformation at a professional services firm, follows the planning and visualizing whenever a new task or project comes her way. Meghan commented, “Recently when my boss added a new mandate to our team, we were able to look beyond the bend and able to identify the potential risks. Having a conversation about these potential risks and known rewards allowed us to shelve the project for a better solution in the future. So, instead of plunging into what would have been a futile effort, we were able to plan and visualize the next steps and identify the stumbling blocks. It saved our firm effort, time, and money and allowed us to focus on other high priority tasks.”

Before jumping with both hands and feet into the deep end of the pool, the visualizing techniques will help you in identifying potential obstacles and plan for a more optimal approach.

2. Prioritize

Prioritization is a way to do focus on things that matter and achieve them.  Each of works differently and have different ways of prioritizing tasks.

Keval Shah, a CTO at a midsize bank, follows the method of taking on things that matter the most. In his mind, the magnitude of impact matters more, and his prioritization is based on how much impact a particular task or a project has for himself, his team, and his company.  Let’s call it prioritization based on potential positive impact.

Ari Rosen, a VP of Sales at an industrial chemicals firm, has a different way to prioritize.  He follows proven tips of top leaders. For example, he tries to schedule all his important meetings before lunch when he is fresh. (Jeff Bezos of Amazon is a fan of this technique.) Secondly, he addresses small tasks that take less than ten minutes – quick calls, hallway chats, routine emails – for the first two hours of the day including the hour on the train.

if something is working, please continue to follow the prioritization technique.

3. Postpone

In our take it all on and do it all culture, it is difficult to postpone things. But not everything is an urgent matter. So, sometimes doing more involves postponing things when better information for decision making may emerge. Or the problem may go away.

“In our overseas ODC, two vendor teams have had a conflict over a project where they overlap. I know this is common and instead of jumping into the problem right away, I asked our associate who is coordinating both the vendors to ask the vendors to set up a task force to solve the issue. If the vendors cannot jointly resolve the problem within a month, I asked him to tell the vendors; I will need to fly in to solve the dispute. That’s it. That one month time proved to be valuable in mending the differences. Secondly, the thought of the sponsor flying 10,000 miles scared the daylights out of them, and hence they agreed to a modus operandi that worked for all us,” said Fatima Nejad, head of outsourcing for a large investment firm.

The technique of postponing or deferring is not the same as procrastination or dithering. The latter is more of not getting started at all with doubts galore, not an active decision to defer.

4. Delegate

Delegating is a powerful tool in productivity toolkit. While the inner workings of the delegation are out of the scope of this article, suffice it to say delegation involves understanding the problem, the potential impact, identifying the right team members to delegate it to, defining the parameters of success, and monitoring the same.

So, a fundamental question is not whether you can do the job (and even better than anyone perhaps) but what else should you be doing and who else can shoulder the current responsibility.

John Chiang, an SVP of technology at a pharma major, commented, “I was invited to speak at an industry conference.  For one I didn’t have time. Secondly, I thought one our newest VPs, who was with an analyst firm in one of his prior roles, was the best-positioned individual for the speaking role. So, I requested him to go to the conference and did a stellar job. And he was elated that he was selected even though his relatively short tenure at the firm. A win-win.”

Delegation not only frees you up to accomplish more, but allows your team members to mature and grow, and engenders team spirit and camaraderie.

5. Divide

Divide and conquer is one of the essential military strategies. While business may not be a war all the time, the concept of dividing and conquering works well often.

For example, a task may have some routine pieces of work that a junior member of the team may get done faster and better. And there may be some critical picking the fork type scenarios where your input and insight may come in handy.  So, why not let your junior staffer participate in contributing to a critical project and then you can help with the strategic aspects of it.

The concept of dividing also can apply to how you schedule your meetings. For example, a 15-minute meeting often may help resolve an issue rather than elongate every meeting to an hour.

6. Clarify

Clarifying what the project or task is all about and what your superior’s expectations are around deliverables is a powerful way not to over deliver.

For example, why do you need a tank to kill an ant?  And not every meeting requires a 40-page PowerPoint slide deck.  Not every client meeting requires jumping on a plane for a cross-country journey for an in-person meeting.  Not every project is transformational and needs commensurate planning.

Merle Minkin recently transitioned from investment banking to work in a high-tech firm.

“I am relatively new to my company. Recently, my boss wanted to chat about M&A opportunities and my immediate instinct was to create an analysis of our capabilities and strengths and potential acquisition targets. But when I caught him in the hallway, he suggested just grabbing lunch to discuss based on my prior job experience and expertise. It wasn’t a formal analysis at all. Thank goodness I clarified before a couple of all-nighters preparing an M&A analysis document,” said a relieved Merle.

Of course, Merle may have to do the M&A analysis at some future point, but the vital lesson here is that without clarifying what the task is, Merle could have lost a lot of productive hours on something that boss did not need or ask.

7. Reuse

If you have been in a career for more than a decade, you have been through a lot of similar situations before and have the necessary expertise, experience, and also material that you can reuse.

For example, a lot of PowerPoint layouts are reusable and may generate ideas while looking at a particular block in a slide.  Or you may have templatized several things based on how reusable they are. And of course, you can reuse the accumulated intellect in more ways than one.

“I have been on one too many transformation programs, and I have the process down to science. I have templates and checklists for everything including samples from past projects. So anyone on my PMO team will get a jump start and not waste weeks of time drafting a simple project charter or a RAID (Risks, Assumptions, Issues, Dependencies) format,” says Gary Williams, a veteran PMO leader.

Reuse does not mean “plagiarism” or the lazy person’s way of doing “Find and Replace” for project terms. It is about reusing concepts, templates, formats, approaches, frameworks – which are time-tested and valuable.

8. Reframe

Sometimes reframing the problem may make it not seem a problem anymore. And most of the time reframing provides a divergent perspective and hence may limit the scope.

For example, “Hiring a New VP for Analytics” is a highly involved task and to find the right candidate may take many months and several interview cycles.  Reframing it as “We need to develop an analytics strategy,” may help you hire a professional services firm, get that project done and in that process define the future operating model and organizational structure.  By reframing the problem, you have made it better as now you have a strategy, a roadmap, an operating model, and an organizational structure done by expert consultants. This strategic exercise, in turn, will offer a deeper understanding of the role and type of person you will need.

9. Fail Fast

The “F” word may be a forbidden word in many people’s minds, but often small failures contribute to big wins.  There is no point in trying to salvage a lost cause. So, defining the correct parameters of success, time boxing a project, and then killing it when it becomes obvious that there are fatal flaws in either the assumptions or the execution is an excellent way to boost productivity.

10. Don’t do the following productivity sappers:

• Don’t engage in distractions such as social media and other things at work.
• Avoid office politics like the plague.
• Politely decline meetings that do not add value.
• Don’t go late to the meetings.
• Never hang on to your team members in the hallway when they are between meetings.
• Don’t be disorganized and scatterbrained by taking on too many loose threads.
• Seek help often.