Business Management Skills

Revealed in this article is a major obstacle you face for achieving effective time management.

Stop trying to prioritize by importance. That’s a major piece of advice from someone obsessed with time management. See effective time management.

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.

Time flies so fast doesn’t it? Deadlines. Scarce resources. Overwhelming chores. And other people who take up way too much of your precious time.

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.

Here’s a question for you: Have you prioritized a list of things to do by degree of importance? If you only have a few things to do, then it works a charm. But if life was so smooth you wouldn’t be reading an article on time management would you?! So you end up neglecting certain areas of life because prioritizing only works so far. One major question is making the choice between multiple options.

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 can you combine importance with urgency? Say it’s Saturday afternoon. Laura has a time with her piano tutor at 3.30pm. So that’s an urgent priority. You plan to read your office work after taking her. But what about the haircut you wanted? At what point is the hair ‘urgent’ enough to be a priority? When it’s long? How long? When the wife nags right?

How can you actually prioritize between all those things so tasks are not left until they are negatively impacting the quality of your life? See time management techniques.

That office memo is majorly important. But the tuition appointment is urgent because it starts in an hour. So the office memo has Priority Importance level A. But your daughters tuition has importance B but urgency A.

Finally, when your wife pokes fun at your overgrown hair, you’ll finally adjust it from the priority list C to the priority list A. But you need to take the wife shopping today so that’s an A too.

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.

It doesn’t work for time management now because modern lifestyles are faster paced and more integrated. That is, you can do more things in the same locations. And the borders of the work place, and working at home have blurred.

Searching for modern solutions about time management software and tools for prioritizing is worth your time. Because your time is the most precious commodity you have. So abandon the traditional time management techniques and develop your own natural time management skill by striking out on new paths. Make your own choices. Discover what works for you. See effective time management.

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