Not so long ago my
family sat down to dinner and the standard question went around:
"So, how was your day?" I said that my day was busy but not
productive. My daughter asked how that could be, since I'd spent so
much time in my office.
I told her that a
lot of unproductive activity passes for "work."
It brought to mind
Stephen Covey's writings on the quadrants where we spend our time. If
you don't have the following two books, buy them today:
 |
The 7 Habits
of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey
|
|
First Things
First by Stephen R. Covey, A. Roger Merrill, and Rebecca R.
Merrill. |
Each book spells
out a nice description of setting priorities. They boil down to a
very simple graphic:
| |
Urgent |
Not Urgent |
| Important
|
|
|
| Not Important
|
|
|
Print that out and
fill in the squares.
Think about the
activities in your day and place them into this matrix. For example,
watching television is Not Urgent and Not Important. Really. It's
not important. Let's look at these areas a little more closely.
Urgent items need
your attention right now. We frequently perceive urgency as
importance, but this is not accurate. For example, if someone rushes
into your office and says "We have to do this right now. I just
realized the deadline is tomorrow," that activity is urgent but may
not necessarily be important.
In our busy lives
and busy jobs we frequently have to address the problem of having tasks
thrust upon us at the last minute. Items can move from Not Urgent to
Urgent simply because we let too much time pass. One of my favorite
signs is this:
|
Lack of Planning on Your Part
Does Not Constitute an
Emergency
On My Part
|
As a general rule,
work should not be Urgent. But work that is delayed will
inevitably become Urgent. Deadline-driven projects are good to the
extent that you meet the deadlines. If everything gets put off until
the deadline, then something that didn't need to be Urgent has
become Urgent.
The worst kinds of
urgent activities are re-work and deadlines that
"sneak up" on us. Rework kills companies. If you have to go back and
do a job over, you are probably wasting lots of the most expensive
resource most companies have: labor. And when you rework one job,
you can't be doing the next. Rework is usually urgent, while work
need not be.
In my technology
consulting business we have a saying: Slow Down and Get
More Done. In another life, I've been the employee asked to pack
80 hours of labor into a 60 hour week. There the saying was:
|
We Never Have Time
To Do It Right
But We Always Have Time To
Do It Over
|
When you slow down,
relax, and focus on the job at hand, you will always be more
productive. When you're not thinking about the next three things
that need to be done, you can do this job better. And if
you're not constantly interrupted, the job in front of you will be
completed much more quickly--and at a higher level of quality. Slow
down, get more done.
Deadlines
are another matter. If you find yourself constantly butting up
against deadlines, then you need to reconsider how you work on
projects. We'll discuss this in more detail in another article.
So what falls into
the category of Not Urgent?
|
Preparation
|
|
Prevention
|
|
Planning
|
|
Setting
Priorities
|
|
Goal-Setting
|
|
Training
|
|
Reading
|
|
Busywork
|
|
"Water Cooler"
Talk |
|
Time Wasters
|
|
Some mail/email
|
Notice that some of
these are important and some are not.
-----
Where do you spend your time?
This is an
important topic, and needs your serious attention.
In our modern lives
we spend a lot of time being very busy, doing unimportant work and
urgent work that didn't need to be urgent. The result is
that we seem busy, and we are busy, but we're busy doing
things that just don't contribute to long-term success.
We're busy doing
unimportant work. Or we're busy doing urgent work that doesn't need
to be urgent. We're busier than we need to be. We're busy doing the
wrong things!
And we're doing the
wrong things because we don't take the time to plan what we do and
then focus on doing what we plan.
If you're fishing
around for a New Year's resolution, here are two goods ones to
choose from:
|
I will examine
how I spend my time and do what it takes to spend most of my
time on activities that are Important but Not Urgent.
|
|
I will set reasonable deadlines and do important
work on schedule so it doesn't become urgent. |
The thing you don't
want to do is stress out over this. Take time. Plan. Do the
Important work of planning, preparation, and setting priorities.
Then figure out how to make the new year a lot more sane and a lot
less stressful.
Slow down
and
Get More Done
|
"It should be no surprise that
good-hearted people fall prey to
workaholism,
because workaholism can look a lot like
dedication!"
-- Melannie Svoboda, SND |
Would you be happy to
pay you
for the work you did today?
### RFS ###
