Time Effectiveness
A simple 6-step process to escape the tyranny of the urgent and the drain of the unimportant.
As I’ve mentioned before, I think Time Management is, well, lame. I think your focus should be more on priority management (see post).
I’ve seen many versions of this graphic, and I’ve found it helpful to keep around.
I come back to this whenever I feel stretched with too many things to do and I’m trying to balance competing priorities.
Here’s my process:
Review my lists of tasks for the week (I keep them in Notion, but I’ve used Microsoft ToDo and OneNote in the past).
Categorize them into I-U, I-NU, NI-U, and NI-NU (based off the above graphic.
Once categorized, I immediately schedule in my calendar a 15- or 30-minute block for each Important-Not Urgent (I-NU) task. This is key, since it’s the one category of tasks I tend to always push if I don’t create the space for them.
Next, anything Important and Urgent (I-U) that will take me less than 3 minutes to complete, I knock it out right away. Anything that will take more that 3 minutes, I schedule in my calendar for later that day (or when appropriate depending on the urgency).
Urgent and Not Important things I try and delegate if I can. And again, anything that will take less than 3 minutes I knock out if I have the time right then. Otherwise, I make a choice to not complete it right now; if it’s not important, maybe I need to take it off my list. The next time I go through this process, if it’s still there I have the opportunity to rank its urgency and importance — if it changes I’ll deal
Last, I look at the Not Important Not Urgent (NI-NU) task. There normally aren’t many, and use my delete button as much as possible. Others I’ll leave for a future review if there’s potential future importance.
This process takes me about 45 minutes, and I do it probably 2-3 times a week (I used to do it every day, but I found if I spent a little more time being ruthless about my rankings I didn’t need to do it daily).
Take out your list, rank them, and escape the tyranny of the urgent and the drain of the unimportant.