As you face your desk or computer in the morning, there are only 2 decisions
– what to do first,
– and how long to spend on that before you get onto whatever is second.
…and repeat.
“What to do first?” is = when = urgency
“How long for?” = value = importance
so, your plan might be to get the urgent stuff done first and then got onto the important stuff:
.
But – if you do the most urgent thing first you might never get around to the important stuff because there is an unlimited supply of unimportant urgent stuff out there for you:
… and this is not a good day (we all have them sometimes!!)
.
(Hang on, can things BE important but not urgent?)
Yes! Everything that matters is!
.
Both at work and at home: if you had more time what would you do?
– your list will ALL be Important but not Urgent
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So the answer is to mix them in – get some important stuff done while the urgent things jsut have to wait for a little bit:
ideally alternating :
but actually there are many more u ‘s, and the i’s are bigger,
so maybe it would end up looking more that like this:
perhaps one in 4 jobs is important, or maybe you just get to do two or three i’s per day
which would still be OK, in fact better than most people achieve!
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But what if you do this and are still not keeping up with all the u’s?
.
Or, more importantly, what if you haven’t got enough time left for the i’s?
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In fact we NEVER have enough time after all the u’s (mixed in as they are) to do ALL the i’s we want to do.
So:
Reduce them using my 5 options (say no, negotiate, delegate, better systems, and be less fussy).
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So to sum up:
The objective of Time Management:
Reduce the time spent on unimportant tasks (quite possibly urgent ones) so we can increase the time spent on the important tasks.
