I take the view that lasting change comes in small incremental steps rather than big dramatic sudden changes in the way we work or act.
In my experience, when it comes to work related resolutions, ‘time management’ seems to be the most popular subject area. People believe that the way to be more successful is through their precious resource, which is time.
Many of us suffer the stress and anxiety of not having enough time in the day to achieve all the things that are demanded of us, or to achieve our goals.
In my experience the simplest and most effect time management model is that put forward by Dr. Stephen Covey, author of the best selling The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.
Covey puts our activities into four groups:
1) Important urgent – crises, new business, deadline driven tasks/projects
2) Important not urgent – planning, preparation, building processes, relationship building
3) Urgent not important – answering email, interruptions, some phone calls, some meetings
4) Not important not urgent – trivia, time wasters, ‘escape activities’
The key to making this model work for us is to shift the focus of our time and effort away from three and four and spend more time on two (the most effective people spend more time dealing with the important not urgent tasks).
If you find that you’re overwhelmed by urgent and important tasks, I’d encourage you to think about why these have become so urgent/important?
We’re always going to have the odd crisis to deal with, but I’d argue many of the things that cause us stress could have been avoided by spending more of our time on planning, delegation, and process.
For example rushing to pay a bill on time could be avoided by taking time to set up a direct debit (important but not urgent).
Remember time management is about being more effective not just doing ‘more’ tasks. So maybe we need to add ‘less is more’ to our list of things to do.
Peter Welch is intermediary director at Equifax-owned, MyTouchstone
