I want my lunch. It’s 12.30pm, and I want my lunch.
Two distractions in the last hour have stopped me from completing this blog (which was the job
I gave myself the last hour before lunch to complete.) The blog is important,
the interruptions were urgent (although neither turned out to be important).
But what could I have done differently? They were urgent. It’s not always easy
to make the distinction between urgency and importance. Stephen Covey, a
clinical psychologist and expert in organizational psychology, uses a simple
diagram that was something of a revelation to me when I was first shown it by
an old boss. It is a set of four boxes. The diagram divides all of the tasks
and responsibilities we have into four categories, called ‘Quadrants’. Covey
calls them I, II, III & IV. (Pictured.) As a basic definition, an urgent
task is one where speed is the most pressing factor. An important task is one
that has a significant impact on the business and your role in it.
Whether we realize it or not, we are constantly prioritizing
things in this way. For example, calling a client to confirm a start date for
your candidate may be the most important thing on your to-do list, but it is
not as urgent as finding the contact lens that has just fallen on the floor.
The contact lens has no significant impact on your job in the long term, but it
must still be done first.
For a sales person, writing the Meeting Report from
yesterday’s visit is very important. Everyone appreciates the need to fully
document our interactions with key customers. The knowledge accumulated from
these visits contributes significantly to our understanding of our customers
and potential customers. It is more important to develop this long term
understanding than it is to place one single person. But you still make the
call to your customer to confirm that start date first, because it is more
urgent.
At first glance the answer to all this might seem simple.
Spend as much time as you can in Quadrant I, avoid everything in Quadrant IV and spend what time you need to Q II and QIII as necessary. But the reality is much more complex than
that. You might think that a CEO would spend all of his time in Quadrant I and
a clerical worker would spend all their time in Quadrant IV. But it’s not the
case. Whatever your role, you have urgent and important tasks. The receptionist
who greets the big client visiting the office is performing a function of
significant importance and urgency. The first impression could make all the
difference and this interaction will be their first encounter with anyone at
Talascend – it’s very important. As to urgency – imagine your client left
standing there for 5 minutes while your receptionist finishes some new hire
paperwork.
Balancing importance and urgency in your day to day tasks is
the road to sanity in time management, falling into the common pitfalls, will send you hurtling in the other
direction. Basics first. Spending all your time in Quadrant IV will get you
fired – and quite rightly. Activities like surfing the net, making personal
calls or going to get coffee are not the things careers are made of. But QIV
has its place, and more of that later. Quadrant III is the deception Quadrant.
This is where time is sucked away. A lot of things in this quadrant are masquerading
as urgent when they are actually not. Badly planned meetings, phone calls that
are twice as long as they should be, some types of paperwork etc. Interruptions
are the most common sources of distraction in QIII like the two I ran into in
the last hour.
It’s difficult.
If a member of your team says ‘Can you come and
help me with this?’ you need to go and help. If it turns out not to be
important or urgent – that’s going to cost you. Good time management will
ensure you don’t spend too much time in this quadrant, as will clear
communication. A friend who works at Google insists that you can control
distractions to some extent. If he speaks to an external vendor who might have
something he is interested in, He will ask them to call back between 2pm and 3pm.
This is also his open office hour for his staff’s minor issues. It allows him
to schedule distractions.’ I know I’ve got to have these conversations,’ he says, ‘At least this way I
know when they’re coming.’
Spending all your time in Quadrant I will send you to some
kind of institution. Nobody can do it. Quadrant I tasks carry inherent elements
of stress (deadlines and pressure mostly) and to be done well need to be
balanced with other tasks – even, surprisingly, a little bit of Q IV. QIV is
closely linked to QI. In between two urgent, important tasks like finishing a
board report and doing a press interview, a friend of mine at Amazon.com always
takes a break, he says he will wonder out of his office, get a diet coke and
spend five minutes talking to a colleague about football. Even if it means
being a little late. He will do a better interview that way. What he’s doing is
visiting QIV to help him do a better job in QI. If we don’t plan to spend a
little appropriate time in Q IV, we will end up there anyway. Because that’s
where we run when we burn out. Spend six or seven hours on any given day
focused entirely on something demanding, and you will not be productive for the
last two hours. It’s too late to take a sensible break then – you’re done. You’ll
end up in QIV – walking round the parking lot, leaning back in your chair with
your fingers pressed to your temples trying to re-motivate yourself. If you’d
only planned to spend twenty minutes that lunchtime sitting in the kitchen with
your iPod on reading a newspaper, and walked outside for a Starbucks for 15
minutes late afternoon – you’d have been fine. You might even have got a couple
of extra hours out of your day.
This brings us to QII. QII is your source of sanity and
control. Here lies strategy and
planning. Not spending enough time in this quadrant is the reason productivity
falls apart. This is where you manage your time in all the other quadrants.
Obviously, it’s easy to sacrifice the important in favor of the urgent. Nobody
is going to lean over your shoulder and tell you to stop making sales calls so
that you can sit quietly for an hour and make a list of things you want to
accomplish over the next 12 months. That’s not how a business works. But every successful business person from
Donald Trump to Sir Alan Sugar is on the record saying that it is vital that
you make time to do this. Stopping to check that you’re doing the right things
is essential – even though it means stopping.
Most sales and recruitment people
are bad at this. It’s because we believe there is nothing more important than
picking up the phone and selling. There are metrics to be hit, targets to
achieve and money to be made. Surely the best way is to just get on with it?
No. It isn’t. What we’re really doing when we do this, is driving our car
around aimlessly hoping to stumble back onto the right road, rather than
stopping and getting the map out. Chances are the fastest way to get there is
to stop. As Yogi Bera said, ‘If you don’t know where you’re going, you may not
get there.’ A sensible amount of time planning your week will make that week
more productive, even if it means productivity time is spent on it. If you just
throw yourself headlong into unstructured and unplanned activity – it doesn’t
matter how hard you work or how talented you are, you’re going to spin your
wheels without progress – costing you much more time than the planning would have taken.
At the end of the day, all of this is about forming positive
habits. Warren Buffet says that the chains of habit are too light to be felt
until they’re too heavy to be broken. A sobering thought, but it’s equally true
that good habits are self perpetuating and that the smallest positive impact of
good time management on your day to day working life will make your life
easier, and motivate you to do even better. Ultimately, nobody can manage your
time for you. The right answer could be different for everyone. Understanding
the difference between urgency and importance and planning time to carry out
tasks accordingly is a starting point.
Now it's lunchtime.
Richard Spragg writes on various subjects including global engineering staffing and global engineering jobs.
Richard Spragg writes on various subjects including global engineering staffing and global engineering jobs.
