I always thought I was a good time manager, but recently I’ve been wondering whether I’m deluding myself. If I was so efficient, how come I haven’t written that book I’ve been talking about for ages or contacted all those potential clients I discovered last year? Maybe I’m not the time management guru I think I am?
So what’s gone wrong? Like most of us I run my business life with a multitude of categorised action lists. There’s one category for each of my clients, one for marketing, one for admin, etc. They all get reviewed each Friday when I plan out my week ahead. It’s not rocket science, but it pretty much ensures that everything urgent gets done. What it doesn’t attend to is lots of stuff that would really help the growth of my business, like networking and book writing. This got me thinking and reminded me of a useful idea from Stephen Covey’s excellent Seven Habits of Successful People.
Covey categorised all tasks into four areas:
- Important and urgent tasks. For example a pressing deadline on an important project or calling back a critical client. Some time will need to be allocated to this category, but people who spend most or all of their week doing these sorts of things are letting the week run them rather than the other way round
- Not Important but urgent. These are activities such as responding to phone calls, flicking up your email too frequently, attending unnecessary meetings and reacting to artificial deadlines. Once recognised they should be cut back as much as possible. Some people do lots of these to look more important than they really are!
- Not important and not urgent. Unnecessary tasks we do to kill time or put off important things we don’t want to do. Surfing the web, shuffling paper round our desk, going into too much detail for a report or fiddling around with spreadsheets for no recognisable benefit.
- Important but not urgent. These are activities such as training, personal improvement or for me writing books! Life is going to go on in the short term if they’re not done, but in the longer term you’ll suffer. They usually result in some sort of long-term growth. They are not reactionary tasks like the urgent ones but require foresight to understand why you need to do them and discipline in ensuring they are scheduled amongst the other more urgent tasks.
My personal report card for these four areas are:
- Important and urgent. My categorised lists ensure these all get done in a timely way
- Not important but urgent. Once again I’m good at these. I try not to attend meetings without really needing to, check emails only three times each day, etc.
- Not important and not urgent. Thought I was quite good here. I don’t consciously waste time dawdling, surfing or chatting. However I wonder if my perfectionist, slight obsessive traits mean I add too much detail to reports, too many pretty picture for Powerpoints, which don’t really add additional benefit and put off more important tasks.
- Important but not urgent. Book not written, potential clients not contacted; enough said!
So my own personal action plan is going to be to block out time each week to ensure that things like my book and client networking is done and I’m going to cut back on unnecessary detail.
What would your personal report card look like for the four Covey Categories? What would you do to fix any problems you find? Interested to hear any comments as usual.
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{ 1 comment }
A great method of ensuring “important but not urgent” activities get completed is to book time out for them in advance of actually taking the time to do them. By this methodology, if something more urgent crops up in the midst of you working away on that item, you simply pick another time to work on it. As this repeats, keep track of how many times you’ve re-scheduled. If it gets to 2-3 more repeats, don’t allow anything else to take priority. Just get it done!
The second pointer I would give is to ensure you’ve broken down big activities into a step-by-step plan, with achievable component parts. For a year’s worth of goals, draw yourself up a plan with milestones for interim completion. If you’re sitting down in January to plan for the year, make sure you personally commit to yourself to have half of the goals done by July and then schedule your first batch of goals, in piece meal fashion, with plenty of slippage buffer in there in case your urgent activities wreak havoc with your plans.
For example:
If you have 6 goals for the year, make sure you schedule one each month (Feb, Mar, Apr, etc.), with an interim checkpoint for 3 to be completed by July and a final checkpoint in November. By this means, you will benefit by having both interim targets for each step and a greater, over-arching pair of personal milestones that will add up to you succeeding in your long-term goals.
Without fore-planning, these types of activities are rarely re-visited and you would find yourself dissatisfied at the end of the year, with only 1 or 2 of the 6 goals met.
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