First Level Leadership

Effective Time Management: There is no Veil of Mystery, Time Only Needs Managing

First step towards effective time management

Stop looking! You will never find time unless…

You become more conscious of the choices you make. This is the essence of time management. Time only needs “managing” because you don’t seem to have enough of it. 

I am going to ask you to spend a few minutes with me now, in order to save a lot of time later.

Life is full of situations that really don’t make any difference in the long run or even in the short run. If you are making your decisions by rote, you are probably not doing yourself a favor. 

What takes your attention? - a letter, or a fax or an email. I think the email takes the cake. It out beats them at all. 

Does the delivery mechanism have a bearing on the importance of the content?

I don’t think so. That email message may not be important at all.

Unless we take conscious control of our decision making, we will tend to react to the urgent, even if it’s relatively un-important; and disregard the important unless it also carries a tag of urgency. Right!

Let’s try to understand the distinction between “Important and Urgent.” 

Important - “An activity that is of great significance or value, motivation that steers your life.”

Urgent: “Any activity that demands your attention right now.”

Effective Time Management requires you to remember this distinction. Not everything that is important is also urgent, and not everything that is urgent is necessarily important.

To grasp this key distinction and to enforce it meaningfully to your life, you need to take a few minutes to think about your own activities and then classify them. 

The four quadrants that emerge from your activities are:

1. Quadrant 1 - Urgent and Important relates to core values and needs immediate attention e.g.

 • I get a call from my son’s school that he is throwing up and is running a fever.• I have to make an impromptu presentation for the CEO today in 30 minutes from now. 

2. Quadrant 2- Important but not Urgent-No sense of immediacy but important in the long run.e.g

• I know that regular exercise is important for me.• I need to plan my son’s higher education.

3. Quadrant 3 - Urgent but not Important - Does not touch core values e.g

• I am running late for a departmental meeting, which I know is a sheer waste of time.• Email with a red flag.

4. Quadrant 4 - Neither Important nor Urgent - Any other stuff that does not fall in the above mentioned quadrants

e.g• Indulging in gossip.• Watching useless TV soaps.

You should try to come up with your own examples from your own life in each category. 

I will not cease to importune you to ask yourself these three questions, whenever possible:

1. Do I really need to be doing this? Or

2. Do I really want to be doing this?

If you say yes - you have made your decision consciously.

3. Do I really need/want to be doing it NOW? If you neither need nor want to be doing it, now or ever – STOP 

There are three catchwords – Need, Want and Now. 

If you stick with the want /need question you will catch yourself red handed doing things you cannot justify – A secret to effective time management.

You have to make time by shifting activities from one quadrant to the other. You will be in a happy position if you have more items in the quadrant no. 2. If you manage your second quadrant well, you will have fewer emergencies and hence your quadrant no. 1 will be fairly empty.

Trust me, this simple technique can have such a positive impact in the way you live. Effective time management isn’t always a matter of time at all.  

Action Item: Make time for important things in life by reducing time spent in the quadrant no. 4 – “neither important nor urgent”

Don’t wipe it out completely because it could be your avenue for unwinding. You can also create time by chopping some of the “urgent but not important stuff”- Quadrant no. 3

I finally leave you with one fundamental question on effective time management:

Name the activities that you are not doing, which, if done regularly, will have a positive impact on your personal and professional life.

Most probably, your answer will fall under quadrant 2. Does it ring a bell – how are you spending the time of your life?

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