I have been working in the Manhattan field office of a national nonprofit consumer credit counseling organization for approximately 2 months. The learning curve for this job is steep, but I’ve adjusted well and think I’ve picked up just about every skill I need at this point. Except one–efficiency. We only have four people in our office–two are counselors and two (including me) do all account maintenance. My job includes everyth ing from “l just got this court summons. What are my options?” to “What’s your mailing address?” The two of us handle all phones, faxes, mail and walk-ins for about 900 clients. And then there are Tasks–system flags coded by priority that require resolution within a certain time frame. These might involve calls to creditors, sending faxes, internal research, or any number of things. As we speak we have about 20 different kinds of tasks needing done, with between 5-25 items for each category.
Needless to say, my job is absolutely INSANE, and we are always running behind. We are usually so focused on addressing immediate client issues that the filing and bill posting pile up to a point that feels beyond hope.
I very much enjoy the dynamic and interesting work that I do, and I love making a positive difference for others. I just need pointers on how to turn it all out. So for all you administrative gurus out there, how do you do it? What tips and tricks help you stay on top of things? I am desperate for any input. My first quality review is in one month and I’d like to make an impression.
My advice would be to resist multi-tasking. It doesn’t save time, it makes tasks take longer to complete. The business world is finally coming around to the fact that it isn’t more efficient, it’s measurably less efficient.
Don’t keep opening emails while you are trying to file. It’s great if you can move yourself away from your desk while you do certain tasks. If you have another work station, do the work there to resist the temptation to click on email or answer the phone. You will have to arrange for phone coverage with your coworker, but you should be able to establish that you are in fact working, not trying to avoid the phone. Or you can send your coworker off with the filing and bills while you cover the phone.
More philosophically, it’s important not to get sucked into the “running around like crazy” that happens in offices. If you are running around, you must be really busy and a hard worker! Nonsense. But it is challenging when the person in charge has this mindset, it can create a culture of running around like idiots.
I think multitasking is somewhat of a subjective thing. One situation where it is likely to save you time is if you spend a lot of time calling people who put you on hold. But don’t just dive into random stuff while you multitask, have some kind of mindless task in queue, like signing letters or alphabetizing your filing or sending stuff to the printer, that is hard to mess up. While you’re on hold is not a good time to open random urgent emails.
Also, for anything that involves handling a lot of paper, get a rubber finger or that Tacky Finger stuff. You will get it done faster if paper sticks to your fingers.
Master the art of copying stacks of documents while keeping the originals in order (if copying is part of what you do).
Think of time-saving innovations and get them implemented. If you have a hold recording, maybe it could include your mailing address. Automating the fax process may be another. Fax machines are a huge time suck.
It might make sense for you and your peer to specialize in some of the tasks.
I wonder if y’all could pick a block of time - say Wednesday morning or something - where for two hours, nobody answers the phone. Then spend the time doing the paperwork which is piling up.
Learn how long each piece of each task takes, and if there are things that require some sitting around waiting, how long you have to wait. Then you can figure out what things you can get done while you’re waiting around on something else. This tends to work better in jobs where you have a lot of things that follow certain set steps and a predictable flow, but it can be applied to some extent to just about any job.
It takes time to get to that point, though–you almost have to have each task memorized so completely that it’s practically instinctual. That doesn’t come after 2 months in a totally unfamiliar job, and it won’t happen overnight. But most of the people I’ve trained from scratch have gotten noticeably more efficient around the six month mark. They’re still not as efficient as those of us who have been doing the job for 10 years, but there’s a real difference from where they were even a month or two before.
Get organized. Organization is essential to efficiency. If you’re having to run all over looking for something, or you need 8 things that are in 7 scattered places, everything is going to take longer than it really needs to. Try to get as many of your ducks in a row as possible before starting a new task. Finish as much old stuff as you can before starting something new. Having a lot of half-finished stuff lying around a) is depressing because it feels like you’re not accomplishing anything and b) makes it harder to find what you need to work on something because there’s more shit to sift through.
Set aside a smallish amount of time to work on filing/billing/whatever uninterrupted on a regular basis. Twenty minutes every other hour, one of you fly solo while the other does nothing but filing and billing. That’s not a horrible amount of time to do the phones, etc. alone, and it’s really amazing what you can get done in that amount of time if you don’t have to stop every minute or so and get the damn phone. Then as you get caught up, you can decrease the frequency of these times, or spend them doing other stuff that tends to get shoved onto the back burner.
