Stop Prioritizing To Achieve Time Management Success

Does your time get trapped by following these 3 old-fashioned time management techniques?

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.

Time flies so fast doesn't it? Deadlines. Scarce resources. Overwhelming chores. And other people who take up way too much of 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.

Here's a question for you: Have you prioritized a list of things to do by degree of importance? If you only have a few things to do, then it works a charm. But if life was so smooth you wouldn't be reading an article on time management would you?! So you end up neglecting certain areas of life because prioritizing only works so far. One major question is making the choice between multiple options.

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?

How can you actually prioritize between all those things so tasks are not left until they are negatively impacting the quality of your life?

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.

Finally, when your wife pokes fun at your overgrown hair, you'll finally adjust it from the priority list C to the priority list A. But you need to take the wife shopping today so that's an A too.

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.

I think I've dramatized enough the many calculations that must be made for juggling decisions on task to act on in your time management planning. And we only included just a few tasks in our example scenarios. Trying to prioritize by importance mixed with urgency only leads to overwhelm and giving up on using time management systems altogether.

Modern time management needs something far better than the old fashioned method of prioritizing. Such a limiting time management technique creates big problems.

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 systems you live by.

Article Source: http://www.thearticlenet.com

Real time management solutions are available from Nathan T Shaw in his time management system.
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