Trying To Prioritize By Importance For Time Management

Does your time get trapped by following these 3 old-fashioned time management techniques?

Time management trainers still pull the wool over your eyes with the old-fashioned technique of prioritizing by importance. Another problem area is scheduling activities to time. And a third problem is using weekly to-do lists.

In this article I will explain the problem of prioritizing by importance. Having just gone against the grain of traditional time management, you will have a glimmer of hope, and a dashing of skepticism. Hope because you know normal time management systems are a pain. And Skepticism because what I'm going to show you is not common.

Naturally, the 'time flies' phenomenon is great if you're in 'the zone' of productivity and life satisfaction. But how do you juggle all the deadlines, resources, and other people to find the balance?

Today's time management system must incorporate your working life with your personal life. Your hobbies and social activities must be tied in with your career development. This is the modern era of efficient organized lifestyles after all.

Think of a handful of chores. Get your hair done. Cut the grass. Take the pet to the vet. Fill that outstanding paper work in, create some form of a meal, AND get your daughter off to her pain lesson. Developing your time management skill of prioritizing effectively seems an excellent plan.

Have you tried prioritizing a list of things to do when you have dozens of things to do? It gets messy doesn't it? You try to arrange the order to decide on the most important thing. And you go and do that first. The thing is that areas of life get neglected because there isn't enough time to do everything when you prioritize by importance. Some things are always low on the list.

You would never get round to the less important things until they are overwhelming. Like the big pile of dishes to wash up when you've run out of plates. Or organizing the files on your computer when you finally accept that you lose more hours per day looking for things than working.

So Let's Try Combining Importance with Urgency. If it's Saturday afternoon, and Sally's appointment with tutor is 4pm, then that's an urgent priority. So you can read your memo after taking Sally. But what about your hair cut? At what point do you consider that 'urgent'? When it's long? Or when it's 'too' long? Or when the wife nags, or the boss frowns?

How do you really prioritize between reading a memo and taking Sally to her tutor and getting your hair cut? Should you try to prioritize by urgency?

Taking your daughter to her lesson is not as important as reading the office information. So the office work is more important (you'll be fired if you don't keep up). But the lesson for your daughter is in an hour, so that's urgent. You could try doing them both at the same time couldn't you?

The wife made fun of your hair again today so you'll cross off the hair cut from the C priority list and put it on the A priority list. You can read the memo tomorrow (Friday) with enough time left while the shops are open, and in time to get back to take the Wife out, so you decide the hair cut is urgent, and should move to priority level A.

Along comes Saturday 3m, and the tutorship and office memo are all also on the A list.

I think I've dramatized enough the many calculations that must be made for juggling decisions on task to act on in your time management planning. And we only included just a few tasks in our example scenarios. Trying to prioritize by importance mixed with urgency only leads to overwhelm and giving up on using time management systems altogether.

Prioritizing by importance or urgency doesn't work because modern life is way too busy for such a shallow method often what is screamingly urgent is not important compared to other things. Trying to prioritize by importance or urgency creates big problems. It used to work, but not today.

You need to find an alternative to the normal same old same old time management techniques that they're trying to force feed you with today. Your time is the most precious commodity you have got. Mind how you use it and which time management systems you live by.

Nathan F Shaw teaches a new time management system and runs online workshops on life direction and career development.

Title:
Trying To Prioritize By Importance For Time Management
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