Why Good Girls Don't Get Ahead_. But Gutsy Girls Do - Kate White [40]
What I do is close my door for an hour a day (and before I had a door I actually used to find quiet places in the building or even the cafeteria).
It took me a while to feel nervy enough to do this on a regular basis—not only because good girls have a hard time saying no to people, but because we also have a fear of looking like we're being naughty, something we assume that a closed door may suggest.
The idea of closing your door for priority work became popular with time-management experts during the seventies but lately it's faced some criticism. In his research on how managers use their time, John Kotter, Konosuke Matsushita professor of leadership at the Harvard Business School, found that they are extremely fluid, responding constantly to interruptions and problems. A closed door, he theorizes, disrupts fluidity. But I believe that if you don't do it, you will spend your day like a ricocheting bullet. A few words of caution, however:
• Your closed-door time should never be first thing in the morning because that's when people need to see you with problems from the afternoon before.
• It should be roughly the same time every day so people come to recognize it for what it is rather than think you're sleeping off a hangover or having a nasty fight with your husband or boyfriend on the phone.
• It shouldn't be too long (about an hour is good), or it will annoy the hell out of people.
• Your boss has to be comfortable with it—some bosses hate it when subordinates close their doors, and if that's the case, don't.
One other option I'm fond of: the half-closed door. It shows you're alive and working but discourages those with less-than-urgent business.
Banish the Time Intruders
Each day we're all bombarded by time intruders. Sometimes time intruders are inanimate—traffic jams, broken copy machines—but 85 percent of the time they're other human beings. That's why it's so hard for good girls to handle them. Our instinct for being nice prevents us from booting these people out of our office or saying no to their requests for help they should be getting elsewhere.
This is not to say that everyone who pops into your office and asks, “Gotta minute?” is a time waster. Studies have shown that effective managers have frequent interruptions from staff members and often these interruptions provide essential information. Sometimes, in fact, the person doesn't even realize that a piece of info is important, and you stumble upon it during a casual discussion. If you are constantly finding ways to limit their access to you, or shoo them out of your office, you can end up out of the loop.
On the other hand, people will often eat up far more of a good girl's time than necessary. You have to know how to manage your time with them and not give in to your tendency to be polite and nurturing.
Try these strategies:
• Stop being a good listener about personal issues. If you let them, people will turn you into their in-office therapist, confessing to you that their boyfriend says he can't relate to them because they've never been in a twelve-step program or describing in detail their irritable bowel syndrome. Avoid therapist behavior, such as very relaxed body language and expressions like “Hmmmmm.”
• When someone does drop by your office, set a time frame around the encounter. “I have a meeting at one P.M., but I can take ten minutes now.”
• If the person has made his or her point and now is into chitchat, get up gradually (first sitting on the arm of the chair instead of in it) and then slowly ease your way toward the door.
• Don't add anything to the conversation. You have to resist the urge that good girls have—even with a nowhere conversation—to ask a question or pleasantly affirm what the person is saying. Every time you say, “Really. That's amazing,” you are guaranteed to lose a minimum of five more minutes of your time.
Be a Ballbuster with Paperwork
Just as people will take advantage of a good girl's