paul-kingTime Management Tips - no.2
Understanding Urgent Vs Important
By being pro-active rather than reactive, and ensuring you work on ‘the right’ things rather than on all things you will become far more effective in work and in life.
Maelstrom is a timeless classic and favourite game of mine, a lot like the popular asteroids. It provides a great visual aid to describe how your daily activities fit within Urgent & Important frameworks.
Here are a few screenshots from the game…
The Important Tasks
1) Not Urgent + Important - These are the fast little asteroids which aren’t on an immediate collision course. They won’t kill you straight away but these little guys will get you eventually. Best to pick them off now before they become a threat later on.
(business) think of preventative tasks, personal development, networking, planning, developing new product lines - all the things which will ensure growth & long term survival but are easy to put off. You need to spend more time on these tasks.
2) Urgent + Important - This is anything which is on a collision course to wipe you out. If you don’t deal with it right now there will be serious problems.
(business) This could be a crisis, a meeting with your bank manager / investor, the filing of an impending VAT return. Always deal with these things in a timely fashion.
The Unimportant Tasks
3) Not Urgent + Not Important - Slow asteroids which just ramble along, no threat at all. But by far the most fun to shoot gung-ho at! And once you do, there will be a whole barrage of smaller faster asteroids to deal with when you have to play catch-up
(business) Sneaky time spent on facebook, procrastinating, basically most things you know you shouldn’t be doing. Don’t waste time on these!
4) Urgent + Not Important - Shooting stars appear momentarily and give you points when shot. But they are never a threat and you often get hit by something else while you’re distracted by them.
(business) A ringing telephone, any staff interuptions which take you away from your train of thought and working. You need to exercise restraint in dealing with these things all the time. Learn to say no!
What a great analogy for your working day! By visualising activities like this it’s easy to see you should be spending more time in quadrant 1 (the non-urgent, important tasks) and less time in quadrants 3 and 4 (the unimportant quadrants)
Developing these habits will help you to massively increase your productivity. Why not use 1DayLater to track your time spent in each area as you try to improve your working focus day-by-day.
Props to Steven R. Covey & his great book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People for teaching me about this awesome technique.
