ISFMA the Blog

Does your time get trapped by following these 3 old-fashioned time management techniques? See time management software and tools.

One of the biggest time management goofs of all time is to prioritize by importance or urgency. Another disaster area of time management training is to schedule your activities to time. And the third major mistake people try to manage time with is the traditional weekly to-do list.

So now that I’ve contradicted the 3 major time management techniques, thus dug my self a whole of credibility, I will make it worth your while to understand why this is so important for your future time management skill with the rise of modern faster paced living conditions and the technological provision of a lifestyle of liberty and flexibility.

Why does time fly? Procrastination (let’s be honest here), absent mindedness, deadline pressures, limited resources, overwhelm… not to mention OTHER PEOPLE making demands on your precious time!

And that’s just at work!… But a Time Management System in today’s fast economy must include both your work life as well as your personal life (leisure, hobbies, social relations, chores, etc).

How can you get your hair cut, mow the lawn, take the dog to the vet, fill in those blasted document forms, make dinner, AND drop Sally off at her tutor?! Weekends seem to be used more and more just for catching up on life’s basic necessities. Clearly, developing your time management skill is more than just a good idea.

So let’s begin with a question: Have you prioritized a list of things to do by level of importance recently? It works doesn’t it. In a messy kind of way. Not quite ‘plain sailing’ though… It’s ok if you don’t have much to do, but then you wouldn’t be bothered about a time management system in the first place if you didn’t have quite a few things to juggle. So you’ve probably noticed, just writing down a list and prioritizing by importance or urgency doesn’t work as well as you’d like. Do you have to neglect certain areas of life because other things are ‘more important’? Should you list priorities by 1 to 10 and just focus on number 1 until it’s done and then move on to number 2?

You would never get round to things like cutting the grass, exercising regularly, filing papers, reading your kids night time stories.

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?

How do you really prioritize between reading a memo and taking Sally to her tutor and getting your hair cut? Should you try to prioritize by urgency? See time management skills.

Taking Sally to her Tutor lesson is not as important as reading and responding to that Memo in your briefcase by Monday morning, plus it’s not till tomorrow afternoon anyway. So on Friday the memo is urgently important at an A level, and Sally’s tutor is only urgently important with a B level.

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.

Prioritizing by importance or urgency doesn’t work because modern life is way too busy for such a shallow method often what is screamingly urgent is not important compared to other things. Trying to prioritize by importance or urgency creates big problems. It used to work, but not today.

You need to find an alternative to the normal same old same old time management techniques that they’re trying to force feed you with today. Your time is the most precious commodity you have got. Mind how you use it and which time management training you live by. See time management skills.