Time Management is a Myth or at least a misnomer. There is no managing of time. It keeps ticking away with complete disregard to you and I. There have been hundreds of books written on the subject and I have purchased and read more than a few of them. What I have learned from my efforts is that there is no such thing as managing time. We can be more efficient with our use of it with methods like time blocking but the most important skill that we can develop to help us lead successful and productive lives is spending the appropriate amount of time on the right activities and that is the definition of prioritization.
To me and some others, prioritization evokes visions of some great fire breathing dragon ready to eat up all of the time we might spend doing things we enjoy like golf, fishing or other hobbies and consume it all with the work that is not fulfilling. If you have job to do or a career that you don’t enjoy that could be the case but there is a greater meaning of prioritization. It is dealing with a series of items in regards to their relative importance so the only reason that your should feel like you did not accomplish anything of importance is that you never took the time to order the importance of the things in your life or you did, and the order is no longer valid so you need to re-order or re-prioritize your life.
I would say that prioritization is one of the most effective uses of your time and a task that is best done early before the day really gets started so the first thing when you get into the office before anyone else is there. It may require you getting up 15 or 30 minutes earlier but the time to plan your day before your day starts planning you is the most likely way to get something of significance done. The more string of days like this that you put together, the more likely that you will be doing more important things, working with more leverage and having more free time than you did previously.
“If you want to make an easy job seem mighty hard, just keep putting off doing it.”
Olin Miller
How is this so you may ask? As you are going about your prioritization and it is either the first time that you have done it or it has been awhile since you have done it you will inevitably have a number of items that are very urgent to be taken care of because of your procrastination. The have become important not because they actually are all that important but because there are penalties associated with them when they are not done in a timely manner. A great example of that would be paying your property taxes. It is really no big deal until it is the last minute and you have not paid them and the penalty could be a larger assessment or fines related to late payment or even a lien placed on your property, all because you did not take 2 minutes to write our a mail a check. Another good example are things like changing the oil in your car, having antifreeze checked before it freezes or getting new brakes when the old ones start to wear. There are huge penalties you may have to pay if you don’t do simple things at the right time. There are always things like this, some work and some personal that we need to get done on a daily basis so it is important to have schedules of when things get done.
One method that I use to deal with this is what I call Busy Mom Method. It involves doing some of the tasks that you have to do in groupings based on the type of brainpower and time needed to do them or allowing things things of a similar nature stack up and picking a time to do them all at once. You’ve probably also heard this called time blocking. I like call it Busy Mom Method based on some of the simple systems I have seen busy moms use to manage the things they have to do more effectively.
One thing that we is prepare breakfasts and the main meat for all of the weeks meals on the weekend. I like to grill with charcoal so when I go to the trouble of getting it ready, I don’t just cook the meal we are about to eat on it, I cook enough for the week so then all we have to do for dinner every night is choose the sides to go with it. Similarly for the kids breakfast they love pancakes so I cook enough pancakes on Saturday morning for the whole week and freeze them. It makes mornings run much more smoothly with that extra time that it would have taken to prepare something.
In essence, time blocking is making an appointment with yourself that you know you will keep to get something that you regard as important done. One of my favorite ways to go about doing this is to set a daily and weekly time block aside to prioritize the day and week. I like to do some brief planning on Sunday evening so my wife and I can get on the same page about the kids activities and our schedules for the week and then every morning before the day starts I pick the 3 most important things that I want to accomplish and block a time to do them. These are scheduled around appointments with others and activities already blocked on my calendar. Ideally, I’d like to have what I call the “3 Big Rocks” knocked out by noon the same day that way I know that I will have a productive day even before the day is halfway done.
In my next post I will go over what makes Time Blocking fail and ways to keep it on track.