18 : Putting Things Off
The Coaching on the Edge website is now live but, if I'm honest, it could in theory have been live a lot sooner.
The site was designed for me by someone who did everything other than putting the text onto the pages. It reached that stage over a year ago which means it took me over a year to write and add the text, find a host server, upload the site, check it all out etc.
One of the reasons was that although it was important it wasn't urgent and so often those are the things that get put off and put off waiting for the 'right time'.
The basis of effective Time Management is Planning and Scheduling. Without it you
have little control over your time. It's not enough to have an ever expanding To Do
list. You also need to prioritise and schedule your work. And the things that tend not to get scheduled are often the Important but not Urgent jobs.
The table below is a useful starting point for thinking about prioritising.
Each item on your To Do list can be given one of the four codes.
Then the sensible thing to do would be to prioritise scheduling the A1 (urgent &
important) items. But we don't always do the sensible thing.
Many years ago, I was working on a proposal for consultancy work which had to catch the last post. Yet I found myself checking train times between London and Wales to see how easy it would be for my daughter to visit her father if we moved to Wales (a vague thought at the time). This was definitely a B2 (not urgent & not important) activity and typical avoidance behaviour.
Which is why time management is not just about having good systems and tools. It's often more about the reasons we don't use them.
But for this article I want to stay with tools that do help if we use them.
Having scheduled your A1 (urgent & important) items, what would be your next
priorities? Most people go to the A2s (urgent but not important). In other words, they
are driven by Urgency rather then Importance. There are a number of reasons for this.
It's often easier to be 'reactive' than 'proactive' and when we are responding to what
is Urgent we are often being reactive. We don't have to think too much – we just have
to 'do it now'. Another reason is that, whether you are working in a hierarchical
organisation or self-employed with clients/customers, you are often responding to
other people's urgency.
I'm not saying that less important but urgent items should be ignored. But because,
for most of us, the urgent tasks just seem to keep accumulating, the things that we
often don't get to are the B1s (important - sometimes perhaps only to you which is
why they don't get an urgent 'sticker' - but not urgent). And it's because we don't get
to them that they often end up being Urgent – and then not being given the time and
attention they warrant.
Are there any Important but not Urgent tasks or activities that have been hanging
around in your life for a while? Writing a new marketing plan? Doing a report?
Updating client records? Figuring out what you want to do with the rest of your life?
Creating a project plan? Organising an away-day for your team? Strategic planning?
Redesigning systems? Finishing (or starting) your web site? Decluttering your home?
Apart from being driven by urgency, another reason we sometimes prioritise A2
(urgent but not important) rather than B1 (important but not urgent) activities is that
the B1 activities may require a bigger chunk of time. To me, writing all the content
for the website and engaging with the technical aspects of creating, uploading and
maintaining a website felt like a mammoth task. Every now and then I scrawled some
notes sitting in a café but not in a very focused way.
Then one day I said to myself – "Lynda, if you were one of your clients you wouldn't
let them get away with a year of 'I'll get around to it soon'". This created the
motivation. The next step was the 'strategy' for dealing with B1 (important but not
urgent) activities – which is quite simple. You don't wait until you have time to do the
whole thing or try to schedule the whole thing. You break it down into small steps and
you schedule the steps. Instead of "write the content" – which felt like a huge task
(what did I want to say, what didn't I want to say, how should I say it ….) I broke it
down into "write the 'about the coach' content" (which felt like the most difficult –
another good time management strategy is do the difficult things first), "write the
FAQs", "download a programme for transferring the site to the Internet" and so on.
Then, instead of nothing getting scheduled, these activities got scheduled – and they
got done – and, as is so often the case, the whole thing took only a few weeks and, as
is so often the case, I wailed to myself "Oh why didn't I do this sooner?"
Activity
- Identify an 'Important but not Urgent' activity that has been hanging over you for some time.
- Break it down into small steps.
- Add some of those steps to your To Do list and give them an A1 priority
- Schedule them
- Do them
- Repeat steps 3 to 5.
Of course, once you start you may find that the momentum to continue builds very
quickly and what seemed difficult becomes easy.
In my experience Time & Workload Management is a constant struggle for many people.
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