Time Management – Put First Things First!

Posted by: Andrea Lindsay Posted date: July 02, 2012 In: Management

When Elizabeth first approached me to ask if I could write for Home for Business, I thought “what have I got to say that others might find useful?” This might sound strange coming from psychotherapist and life coach who spends all day talking with people about what they want to achieve and what they need to change to have a better life. A face-to-face session with a ‘real’ person seems so much easier than having to put words to paper for a much wider audience! When I thought about it, though, I realised that there are some fundamental tools that apply to everyone, which can help them to spend their time wisely.
So where do we start? Take a look at the Time Management Matrix below. This is a version of a matrix that I came across when I attended a workshop based upon Stephen Covey’s book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. After attending the workshop I qualified as a facilitator to train others in the tools I had found so effective. So, how do you spend your time?

Ask Yourself:

In which quadrant do you spend most of your time?

• Which quadrants make best use of your time?
• What would happen if you stay in quadrant 1 for too long?
• Where do you think most people spend their time and why?

What Is An Urgent Activity?

How do you classify urgent? Is it something that is urgent to you or urgent to someone else? I remember seeing a sign above someone’s desk many years ago which read “Failure to plan on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part…”!  How often do you find yourself responding to someone else’s lack of planning?  An urgent activity is one that you feel requires immediate attention.  Sometimes we choose to respond to someone else’s urgency due to the wider consequences. We do, however, need to review the importance of the activity before deciding to act.

What Is An Important Activity?

How do you decide whether something really is important? An important activity is one that you personally find valuable. It could relate to work or home and should link in to your wider goals. Important activities are the ones that you need to find time for first. When I attended the 7 Habits workshop, we all had to complete an activity where we had to fit certain items into a long, relatively thin plastic tube. Each individual item could easily fit into the tube; the task, however, was to try to get ALL of the items into the tube and make them fit! We all fiddled around for a while whilst we tried different scenarios, before we realised that we needed to fit the largest things in first, because all the smaller things fell into place around the larger things. So, in life, we need to fit in the big important things first, the smaller important things will fit in around those and then those that are even smaller will either fit in around those or they can be postponed until some of the other higher priority activities have been dealt with. A point to note: most of the ‘big’ things involve relationships, so when you are deciding whether an activity is important or not, see who it affects and what the impact will be on your relationship with them if you don’t correctly prioritise the activity.

Habits

I often work with people who are trying to overcome some form of habit or behaviour that has become unhelpful. One of the most affected groups of people are those that suffer from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). This disorder manifests in compelling the sufferer to repetitively undertake certain activities in order for them to feel ‘safe’ or ‘comfortable’ in some way. It is a control mechanism that has been developed, often as a result of some form of experiential trauma that the individual had no control over. My reason for highlighting OCD sufferers is that they have developed habits and routines that are no longer helpful. They become regimented and find it extremely difficult to cope with changes in routine and environment. Habits and routines are there to make life easier. They help to speed things up and generally keep the cogs of life running smoothly. If you find yourself living to your routines and adhering to your activity schedule instead of prioritising your activities and then scheduling them in, you may be in danger of forgetting what really is important to you.

What Can You Do?

1. How Do You Spend Your Time?

The first thing to do is to reflect upon how you are currently spending your time. Use the Time Management Matrix to help you do this. Review your past week and place each activity/event in the relevant quadrant to enable you to identify which quadrant you spend most of your time in. Most people spend the majority of time in either quadrant 1 or 3. We all spend some time in quadrant 1, but too much time in quadrant 1 leads to burnout. If you are exhausted and under extreme pressure on a regular basis you are likely to make mistakes and become ineffective. You may become resentful and angry and may even find yourself suffering from forms of psychological trauma such as depression or anxiety.

2. What Is Your “Label”?

Whilst reviewing my time management skills when attending the 7 Habits workshop, I had to create a personal ‘label’, reflecting how I saw myself and how others might see me too. I am ashamed to say mine was “I’m a busy person”! Each of us had to then consider how the label influenced our own behaviours and those of other people towards us. It is often said that ‘perception is reality’. If this is so, our self perception, i.e. “I’m a busy person”, becomes our reality. In the end we begin to ‘live the label’. If we want to change the reality, we need to change the perception and to do this we need to change the label. If you find yourself living in quadrant 1, check out whether you too are living the “I’m busy person” label. Maybe you are urgency addicted. Perhaps you derive importance from feeling that all your activities are ‘urgent’.

3. Are You Avoiding Things?

“You may delay, but time will not” – Benjamin Franklin

If you find yourself spending large proportions of your time in quadrants III or IV, perhaps you are trying to ‘escape’. It could be that you are aiming to avoid the stress of quadrant I or don’t want to focus on the effort or reality of the activities in quadrant II. As the quote above from Benjamin Franklin suggests, time always catches up! Spending more time in quadrant II is the only sure way of avoiding spending too much time in quadrant I. There’s no better time than right now to take action!

• Look at what you are doing to avoid spending time in quadrant II.
• Ask yourself what the consequences of this will be.
• Identify a quadrant I activity coming up, where if you take proactive action in quadrant II now, you may stop it from ever reaching quadrant I.

4. Why Say “NO”?

Take a look at what you put in quadrant III when you reviewed your activities for the past week. It might be helpful to know that sometimes quadrant III activities ‘imitate’ quadrant I activities if you are ‘urgency’ addicted. What is most relevant is that none of the activities in quadrant III are important, so you should question why you are spending any time on them at all! Take a good look at each activity and redistribute any that are in reality important and remove those that are not. Only by saying “no” to unimportant activities will you free up the time that you need to focus on quadrant II activities.
Unimportant issues eat up your time. They are the unidentified thief that steals what you cannot control. Although you may not be able to control the passing of time, you can certainly control how you spend your time. To identify an unimportant issue, ask yourself what I refer to as the ‘golden question’: “does it really matter?” To answer this, you need to also answer the following:



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