I don’t think in over 30 years I’ve ever got to the end of my To Do list, nor felt I have enough hours in the day. Making sure I use my time wisely is essential and here’s the best way I’ve found. It comes (for those who like the background) from Stephen Covey’s book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”.
The key concept is moving from dependence to independence, which involves
- Being proactive and shaping what you spend your time doing
- Focus on the end goal – what you are trying to achieve and ensuring others know that too
- Managing your time effectively. How, I hear you ask – I’m too busy?
This model looks at the difference between what’s important and what’s urgent.
- Important tasks are those that get you towards your end goals, what you should be doing
- Urgent tasks are those things we tend our time doing
| Urgent | Not Urgent | |
| Important | Crises: Pressing problems Firefighting Deadlines Last minute requests | Prevention: Relationship building New opportunities Preparation and Planning Risk Identification Personal Development |
| Not Important | Interruptions: Most Emails, some calls Some reports and meetings Other people’s priorities or omissions Urgent masquerading as important Popular activities. | Trivial: Busywork Some emails and calls Time wasters Pleasant escapist activities |
The important and urgent should, and usually does, get focus.
The Trivial is usually the easiest to stop.
The hard bit is moving our focus from interruptions to prevention. Try tracking the tasks you do for a week and putting them into the relevant quadrant to see where you spend your time. More time for prevention by doing less on interruptions is easy to say, but hard to do. It needs great self-awareness and conscious decision making on how we spend our time. Here are the key actions for each quadrant:
| Urgent | Not Urgent | |
| Important | Necessity: Key Action: Manage it Now | Quality & Personal Leadership: Key Action: Decide when to do it and protect that time |
| Not Important | Deception: Key Action: Delegate or use caution | Waste: Key Action: Avoid |
A great example for me was realising I was sinking with too much work in the early days of leading a large programme. I took a conscious decision to let some of the interruptions go (very hard for me) and focus on recruiting the team, a top right activity. Writing blogs for me is another top right task. It’s my way of stepping back, reflecting and thinking, I work best when I set my self the time to write things down in this way.
Lastly, if you are using planner in Teams (I can’t do a blog without mentioning Teams) maybe try using the labels feature to tick if a task is important, urgent or both. Then you can filter on the important ones and focus on the right things. If you are still only using teams at its basic level for meetings and messages would learning how to use Teams to its full capability be important?
Want to know more?
If you have access to LinkedIn Learning, then try these short courses
Four Time Management Tips (11 minutes) – basics of time management
Getting Things Done (30 minutes) – methodology to capture, clarify, organise, reflect and engage with tasks.
Mark Jacot 