7月19日
Using Your Work Time Well
Do constant distractions or wasted time cut down on your productivity at work?
Workday Distractions
It’s amazing today’s workers get anything done. Common office distractions are everywhere0from a constant barrage of e-mail and phone calls to interruptions from coworkers. What’s a worker to do? Try your best to curb the distractions-either self-discipline or polite assertiveness.
A study by Bases, a New York research firm, found that office distractions ate up 2.1 hours a day for the average worker. Fifty-five percent of the 1,000 respondents in the survey said they check e-mail messages either immediately or shortly after the message lands. Jonathan B. Spira, chief executive for Basex, said these workers “are interrupting themselves.”
Kay Stephan, owner of Classicprotocol.com, a business etiquette and training firm, advises checking e-mail only three times a day. If you feel you need to check it more often, she suggests creating a “to-do” folder for e-mail. Use subject lines and e-mail addresses to figure out what you need to respond to first and what might be able to wait.
Protect your time
Assertiveness is the best way to corral a chatty coworker who doesn’t get the hint. Admitting to someone that you’re busy and can’t talk is not being rude. “You have a right to say what you need,” Stephan said.
Phone calls are harder to avoid-especially if you have a job that requires you to talk to clients. If you’re working on a heavy-duty project, it’s OK to let the phone calls go to voice mail, but be clear on your voice mail when you anticipate returning calls, Stephan said.
For all tasks, workers must be able to distinguish between things that are urgent, important or none of the above, Spira said. ”You can’t but off everything. [But] you certainly need to be able to self-reflect and put interruptions … away for what might be a better time,” he said.
Vocabulary Focus
Barrage (n) large number (of questions, criticisms, etc) delivered quickly, one after the other
Assertiveness (n) confidence in communicating a position or claim
Eat up (v) to use a large part of something valuable
Corral (v) to keep people in a particular area, especially in order to control them
Heavy-duty (n) very important, impressive or serious
Distinguish (v) to understand the difference between two things
Discussion Question
Do you use your time well? What’s your discipline of time?
Extra Exercise
1. Translate the following sentence into Chinese, ‘but be clear on your voice mail when you anticipate returning calls’
2. According to the recording, what’s the proper word to fill the blank below, “I couldn’t find an in this mass”?
说明：
1.文本摘自《Advanced 彭蒙惠英语》，由chandler30亲自录入。
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3.参考答案在二楼，回复可见。
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