Nonprofit financial management comes with inherent stressors. Tax time, budgeting time, and end of year accounting can call for some long meetings and late nights. While we like to think we are all as productive as we can be, the fact remains that our days are filled with interruptions that can lead to lost productivity rather than increased productivity.
Experts tell us it can take up to 20 minutes to refocus after an interruption to our thoughts. Think about all the interruptions during your average workday. Phone calls, emails, text messages, instant messages, and people showing up unexpectedly at your desk with urgent needs are all interruptions that can break concentration and slow productivity.
Now, add onto that the late nights of tax preparation season, the long days during budgeting cycles, and other potential business activities that add to your work and you will quickly see why reducing stress and improving productivity in nonprofit financial management is essential.
Five Tips to Reduce Stress and Enhance Productivity
We’ve reviewed the best stress management and productivity advice around to develop this list of nonprofit financial management stress relievers, productivity enhancers, and all around helpful hints.
- Plan: Even though some people insist they cannot plan their days because of work interruptions, planning ahead tends to take a lot of stress off people. Knowing the work you need to accomplish this week, the people you need to speak with, and the other work that takes priority during the workweek helps you fit it into the week’s activities. Even if you are interrupted during the day, you can return to your list and plan and pick up where you left off.
- Turn off instant messages: Turn off the instant messenger apps unless they are absolutely essential to your workplace. Constant dings, pings, and other sounds and flashing messages break your concentration and make it difficult to return your focus to the task at hand. Pick one channel such as Skype, Slack, or another messenger for your team and teach them to use it only for emergencies.
- Schedule time to review and respond to emails: The average employee receives 200 emails a day. We can almost guarantee that just a handful of those emails are truly deserving of a response. To that end, don’t feel obligated to respond to every email immediately. Instead, set aside three time periods—9 a.m., 12 noon, and perhaps 3 p.m.—to respond to emails. This is usually adequate for the majority of nonprofit financial management tasks.
- Set office hours: Set specific periods during the day when your door is open to interruptions. Use this time as your planning period or to review materials and make it the time when you can be interrupted. Then, set aside other times when you wish to be undisturbed. By making this schedule public, you’ll manage interruptions and block them into specific time slots.
- Prioritize: Push the work that will get maximum impact to the top of your list and let everything else flow from there. You may not be able to get to everything you wish to accomplish in a day, week, or month but if you can prioritize around maximum impact work, everything else should fall into place more easily.
Technology as the Servant, Not the Master
Lastly, make sure that the technology available to you is your servant, not your master.
- Learn how to use any time-saving features on it but do not feel obligated to use every feature all the time.
- Turn off notification sounds, pop-ups, or other alerts during your focused time periods.
- Use calendars and scheduling apps to manage your time.
- Automate whatever you can to enhance your time.
- Delegate any manual or routine tasks, when possible, to technology.
With a few adjustments such as these, you may feel less pressured and stressed and more in control of your time. Nonprofit financial management includes many days when unforeseen events, meetings, calls, or tasks take you away from your plan, but there are also days when working your productivity plan will help you do better work.
Beck & Company
Beck & Company is an independent certified accounting firm specializing in nonprofit organizations. Since 1987, we have helped many nonprofits in the Washington D.C. area and along the Eastern seaboard with their accounting and financial management needs. We provide audit, tax, accounting, and consulting service that addresses all aspects of a small to mid-sized nonprofit organization’s business. Contact us or call 703-834-0776 x8001.