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Time Management Problems With Prioritizing By Importance |
By:
Nathan T Shaw |
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Time Management Problems With Prioritizing By Importance
by Nathan T Shaw
Prioritizing by level of importance is a major problem for many people trying to achieve success with time management.
Stop trying to prioritize by importance. That's a major piece of advice from someone obsessed with time management.
Prioritizing by importance has been a common sense time management technique taught for years. So telling you that it is a bad technique might raise some red flags. That's ok. I know I'm right. And you will discover your own solution by understanding this article.
Naturally, the 'time flies' phenomenon is great if you're in 'the zone' of productivity and life satisfaction. But how do you juggle all the deadlines, resources, and other people to find the balance?
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.
Have you tried prioritizing a list of things to do when you have dozens of things to do? It gets messy doesn't it? You try to arrange the order to decide on the most important thing. And you go and do that first. The thing is that areas of life get neglected because there isn't enough time to do everything when you prioritize by importance. Some things are always low on the list.
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 Let's Try Combining Importance with Urgency. If it's Saturday afternoon, and Sally's appointment with tutor is 4pm, then that's an urgent priority. So you can read your memo after taking Sally. But what about your hair cut? At what point do you consider that 'urgent'? When it's long? Or when it's 'too' long? Or when the wife nags, or the boss frowns?
Prioritizing by urgency, what would you do? Take your daughter. Get your hair cut. Read the office paper work. More and more of life gets neglected and messy.
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.
The wife made fun of your hair again today so you'll cross off the hair cut from the C priority list and put it on the A priority list. You can read the memo tomorrow (Friday) with enough time left while the shops are open, and in time to get back to take the Wife out, so you decide the hair cut is urgent, and should move to priority level A.
Along comes Saturday afternoon, and Sally's tutorship now gets crossed off the B list and put on the A list because it's Saturday, and you've got Memo and Sally's Tutorship on the A list.
That scenario does work, but it's not exactly smooth sailing is it? The ABCDE Method of prioritization is difficult to imagine working even with only 3 tasks... But what when you try to mix in the rest of your responsibilities and life? ...And there are changes in what's urgent all too often... so trying to prioritize like that soon gets you in a jam.
Modern time management needs something far better than the old fashioned method of prioritizing. Such a limiting time management technique creates big problems.
When you free yourself of the higher authority of traditional time management techniques you will have a chance to develop your natural time management skill. Hopefully this article has made you skeptical of following normal time management systems so that you search and find something genuinely better for modern life.
Nathan T Shaw teaches organization skills and time management training for those who struggle with time management. Don't reprint this exact article. Instead, reprint a free unique content version of this same article.
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Article Source: http://www.statssheet.com/articles/article54626.html |
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