It is easy, in the onrush of life, to become a reactor: to respond to everything that comes up, the moment it comes up, and give it your undivided attention until the next thing comes up. This is, of course, a recipe for madness.
Having an inbox and processing it in a systematic way can help you gain back some of that control. But once you’ve processed out your inbox and listed all the tasks you need to get cracking on, you still have to figure out what to do the very next instant. This is why setting priorities is so important.
This article explains the three basic approaches to setting priorities, each of which suits different kinds of personalities. The first is for procrastinators, people who put off unpleasant tasks. The second is for people who thrive on accomplishment, who need a stream of small victories to get through the day. And the third is for the more analytic types, who need to know that they’re working on the objectively most important thing possible at this moment.
- Eat a Frog
There’s an old saying to the effect that if you wake up in the morning and eat a live frog, you can go through the day knowing that the worst thing that can possibly happen to you that day has already passed. In other words, the day can only get better.
The idea here is that you tackle the biggest, hardest, and least appealing task first thing every day, so you can move through the rest of the day knowing that the worst has already passed.
- Move Big Rocks
Maybe you are not a procrastinator so much as a fiddler, someone who fills her or his time fussing over little tasks. You are busy busy busy all the time, but somehow, nothing important ever seems to get done.
You can fill the time you have in a day up with meaningless little busy-work tasks, leaving no room for the big stuff, or you can do the big stuff first, then the smaller stuff, and finally fill in the spare moments with the useless stuff. To put it into practice, sit down tonight before you go to bed and write down the three most important tasks you have to get done tomorrow.
In the morning, take out your list and attack the first “Big Rock”. Work on it until it’s done or you can’t make any further progress. Then move on to the second, and then the third. Once you’ve finished them all, you can start in with the little stuff, knowing you’ve made good progress on all the big stuff.
- Covey Quadrants
If you just cannot relax unless you absolutely know you are working on the most important thing you could be working on at every instant, Stephen Covey’s quadrant system might be for you.
Covey suggests you divide a piece of paper into four sections, drawing a line across and a line from top to bottom. Into each of those quadrants, you put your tasks according to whether they are:
I.Important and Urgent
II.Important and Not Urgent
III.Not Important but Urgent
IV.Not Important and Not Urgent
The quadrant III and IV stuff is where we get bogged down in the trivial. Although some of this stuff might have some social value, if it interferes with your ability to do the things that are important to you, they need to go.
Quadrant I and II are the tasks that are important to us. If you are really on top of your time management, you can minimize Q1 tasks, but you can never eliminate them: these things all demand immediate action and are rarely planned for.
You would like to spend as much time as possible in Quadrant II, plugging away at tasks that are important with plenty of time to really get into them and do the best possible job. This is the stuff that the QIII and QIV stuff takes time away from, so after you’ve plotted out your tasks on the Covey quadrant grid, according to your own sense of what’s important and what isn’t, work as much as possible on items in Quadrant II (and Quadrant I tasks when they arise).
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