What Everyone Should Know about Time Management

Feeling Overwhelmed?

I’ve felt overwhelmed in recent weeks. You know the feeling. Between several major projects, the demands of my personal commitments, and trying to find my own quiet time, I’ve been struggling to stay afloat. On top of it, even though I’ve been busy, I feel like I haven’t gotten anything “Important” done. Perhaps you’re there now, or find yourself there regularly. How do you prioritize your time? Are you focusing on the right things? How do you know what “the right things” are? Here is a tool, developed by Franklin Covey, that I use when I’m overwhelmed and unsure if my focus is in the right area.

Photo courtesy: aarongeller (flikr.com/aarongeller)

Importance and Urgency

Everything on your to-do list goes through two mental filters, importance, and urgency. It’s my experience that Urgency always wins. We almost always have a tendency to react to pressure instead of long-term value. Importance, on the other hand, should have an equal, if not higher weight on a lot of your tasks. So, let’s look at these two dimensions to evaluate our to-do list.

• Importance - Deals with the value of something. If I do this, are the benefits high or low? If I don’t do it, are the consequences mild or severe?
• Urgency - Deals with time. Does it need to be done now? Or does it need to be later?

Using these definitions, we can now look at our time a little differently.

The Magic Quadrant

Here’s a surprise for you. Not everything that is urgent is important. Not everything that has to happen right now, yields a lot of results. Similarly, not everything that’s important has the right urgency. We tend to focus on the urgent things (what’s right in front of us) regardless of how important they are, and we leave the important things, the things that could benefit us the most, for later. Unfortunately, later usually never comes. Later is almost always replaced by more “right now.” So, how do you get visibility to this happening? The answer is quite simple. Draw a square on a piece of paper and then divide the square into four quadrants. On the bottom of the big square, right “Urgent” along the X-Axis. On the left of the big square write “Important” along the Y-Axis (a sample of mine is at the bottom of the post). Now you have 4 quadrants to categorize your list of things to-do into :

1. Urgent but Not Important - These are the distractions in life, the noise, the things that keep us from being productive and doing what we should be doing
2. Urgent and Important - These are emergencies. The roof is leaking, the car broke down, the customer is upset. These are necessary, but should consume a lower percentage of your time. If you spend a lot of time here, something in the larger process is broken and needs to be fixed. If you’re a leader, watch out for big lists here…something is wrong with your process!
3. Not Urgent and Not Important - These are time wasters, like watching TV, day-dreaming, etc. They are also important, but in moderation
4. Not Urgent, but Important - These are the things we overlook. These are the “someday” lists that would help us get to our end goal. We should be spending as much time as possible in this quadrant, but sadly, we never do because of the Urgent but Not Important items.

Using this matrix should help you spend more time on the right things, the things that add the most value to you, and help you avoid the distractions. Maybe you’re spending too much time on the time wasters. So, how did you stack up? How much time are you spending in the Important but Not Urgent quadrant?

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