1DayLater - The Blog

Time 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.

Time Management Tips - no.1 

Aggressive Prioritizing / extreme time management

Here’s one of the most effective ways to boost your work productivity. I do this every day and seriously - it works!

Bend time to your will…

Step 1-Create a to-do list every morning

First thing in the morning (after you’ve had your morning cuppa of course) spend 15 minutes constructing a to-do list of activities you feel should get done that day. This won’t be wasted time.

You now have a list of activities

eg.

• 20 activities

• 5 really need doing

Step 2-Use aggressive prioritizing.

If you had to pick just one of these to do today - which one would it be? That is your number 1. Repeat this exercise to find number 2, and so on.

Step 3-Get working!

Stick to the order of your list and make sure you complete each task as much as possible before moving onto the next.

Now if you only get some things done in your day, they will have been the most important ones. Simple but truly effective!

- coming soon: time management for programmers

1DayLater needs Beater testers

Aaaah bad pun sorry! I just couldn’t resist

We’re kicking this week off by asking if anyone would like the chance to Beta test 1DayLater. As well as doing us a massive service, you will also be getting a super early peek at our web-based software in action.

Ideally, we’re interested in testers who have a genuine need to track their day-to-day business activities. Remember that 1DayLater can be used to track time, money & mileage, helping you become better motivated and confident to charge your true value.

The purpose of this Beta testing phase is to help identify any bugs that we might have missed, and to get some early feedback.

Not too brutal though, we might cry :’( Oh only joking…be as brutal as you like - that’s the point in fact! You’ll have to use your intuition to let us know if you think anything’s acting “out of the ordinary” in terms of identifying bugs.

So kind sirs/madams, if you’d like to get involved please visit the 1DayLater website and click the “sign up now” button.

Feedback can be submitted using our new online feedback form, or by sending suggestions to feedback@1daylater.com

Look forward to you joining the ranks :)

Paul