| Reading article |
Time Management Problems With Prioritizing By Importance |
Revealed in this article is a major obstacle you face for achieving effective time management.
Stop trying to prioritize by importance. That's a major piece of advice from someone obsessed with time management.
Prioritizing by importance has been a common sense time management technique taught for years. So telling you that it is a bad technique might raise some red flags. That's ok. I know I'm right. And you will discover your own solution by understanding this article.
Naturally, the 'time flies' phenomenon is great if you're in 'the zone' of productivity and life satisfaction. But how do you juggle all the deadlines, resources, and other people to find the balance?
And you have the problem of combining your social life with your career development, because we all know that modern lifestyles are crossing the border between your professional time management, and your social life.
How can you get your hair cut, mow the lawn, take the dog to the vet, fill in those blasted document forms, make dinner, AND drop Sally off at her tutor?! Weekends seem to be used more and more just for catching up on life's basic necessities. Clearly, developing your time management skill is more than just a good idea.
So let's begin with a question: Have you prioritized a list of things to do by level of importance recently? It works doesn't it. In a messy kind of way. Not quite 'plain sailing' though... It's ok if you don't have much to do, but then you wouldn't be bothered about a time management system in the first place if you didn't have quite a few things to juggle. So you've probably noticed, just writing down a list and prioritizing by importance or urgency doesn't work as well as you'd like. Do you have to neglect certain areas of life because other things are 'more important'? Should you list priorities by 1 to 10 and just focus on number 1 until it's done and then move on to number 2?
You would never get round to things like cutting the grass, exercising regularly, filing papers, reading your kids night time stories.
So can you combine importance with urgency? Say it's Saturday afternoon. Laura has a time with her piano tutor at 3.30pm. So that's an urgent priority. You plan to read your office work after taking her. But what about the haircut you wanted? At what point is the hair 'urgent' enough to be a priority? When it's long? How long? When the wife nags right?
How can you actually prioritize between all those things so tasks are not left until they are negatively impacting the quality of your life?
Taking your daughter to her lesson is not as important as reading the office information. So the office work is more important (you'll be fired if you don't keep up). But the lesson for your daughter is in an hour, so that's urgent. You could try doing them both at the same time couldn't you?
The wife made fun of your hair again today so you'll cross off the hair cut from the C priority list and put it on the A priority list. You can read the memo tomorrow (Friday) with enough time left while the shops are open, and in time to get back to take the Wife out, so you decide the hair cut is urgent, and should move to priority level A.
Along comes Saturday 3m, and the tutorship and office memo are all also on the A list.
The ABCDE method of prioritizing by importance creates a lot of difficulty. Even with just those handful of tasks to account for. When life is far more varied and complex. And you know the mess experienced with time management when everything is put into the mix. Trying to prioritize by importance and urgency is, as I hope you'll agree, next to impossible, and highly impractical.
Prioritizing by importance or urgency doesn't work because modern life is way too busy for such a shallow method often what is screamingly urgent is not important compared to other things. Trying to prioritize by importance or urgency creates big problems. It used to work, but not today.
When you free yourself of the higher authority of traditional time management techniques you will have a chance to develop your natural time management skill. Hopefully this article has made you skeptical of following normal time management systems so that you search and find something genuinely better for modern life.
About the Author
Further examples of effective time management are available from Nathan T Shaw including ideas for business time management and team building training.
Article source http://w4rum.com/2785.t
|
|
| [By Kimber Fulcher] [08/Aug/07] |
