Planning is central to time management. It is formed of two elements:
SETTING OBJECTIVES + PRIORITISING
Once you have your objectives clear, you can go ahead and prioritise. But is this as simple as it sounds?
Daily lists
If you don’t have some idea of what needs to be done ‘today’, ‘next week’, ‘ in the future’, you cannot begin to prioritise.
As most people feel stressed by time pressures on a day-to-day basis, the first logical step is to make daily “To Do” lists (which can be augmented by weekly and monthly ‘To Do’ lists).
Write tomorrow’s list before you leave work! Give yourself 10/15 minutes at the end of the day for this task.
Four quadrants
Then assign priorities to each task on your “To Do” list using the Four Quadrant approach:
1. Urgent and important : top priority – Must be done today
2. Important but less Urgent – Should be done today
3. Urgent but not Important – Needs doing now
4. Not important, not urgent – Could be postponed
Quadrants 1, 3 and 4 are where a lot of people spend their worrying lives!
Quadrant 1 activities are needed to achieve immediate results
Quadrants 2 is where you plan and is a place from where you can reduce pressure on Quadrants 1 and 3.
Quadrant 2 activities impede results.
Quadrant 4 activities are wasted time.
Do the 1s first. 2s need to be looked at every day to avoid them becoming 1s or 3s.
Avoid doing the easy tasks first
We cover all of these time management techniques in detail on our Time Management course in Brighton, Sussex.
