By: Nathan T Shaw
Prioritizing by level of importance is a major problem for many people trying to achieve success with time management.
Time management trainers still pull the wool over your eyes with the old-fashioned technique of prioritizing by importance. Another problem area is scheduling activities to time. And a third problem is using weekly to-do lists.
So now that I’ve contradicted the 3 major time management techniques, thus dug my self a whole of credibility, I will make it worth your while to understand why this is so important for your future time management skill with the rise of modern faster paced living conditions and the technological provision of a lifestyle of liberty and flexibility.
Why does time fly? Procrastination (let’s be honest here), absent mindedness, deadline pressures, limited resources, overwhelm… not to mention OTHER PEOPLE making demands on your precious time!
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.
Here’s a question for you: Have you prioritized a list of things to do by degree of importance? If you only have a few things to do, then it works a charm. But if life was so smooth you wouldn’t be reading an article on time management would you? So you end up neglecting certain areas of life because prioritizing only works so far. One major question is making the choice between multiple options.
You would never get round to the less important things until they are overwhelming. Like the big pile of dishes to wash up when you’ve run out of plates. Or organizing the files on your computer when you finally accept that you lose more hours per day looking for things than working.
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?
That office memo is majorly important. But the tuition appointment is urgent because it starts in an hour. So the office memo has Priority Importance level A. But your daughters tuition has importance B but urgency A.
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 afternoon, and Sally’s tutorship now gets crossed off the B list and put on the A list because it’s Saturday, and you’ve got Memo and Sally’s Tutorship on the A list.
I think I’ve dramatized enough the many calculations that must be made for juggling decisions on task to act on in your time management planning. And we only included just a few tasks in our example scenarios. Trying to prioritize by importance mixed with urgency only leads to overwhelm and giving up on using time management systems altogether.
Modern time management needs something far better than the old fashioned method of prioritizing. Such a limiting time management technique creates big problems.
You need to find an alternative to the normal same old same old time management techniques that they’re trying to force feed you with today. Your time is the most precious commodity you have got. Mind how you use it and which time management systems you live by.
About the Author
More ideas on how to manage time are available from Nathan T Shaw including time management software reviews.
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