Are you an addict? Managing your time badly is an addiction.
Those of you who struggle to manage the sheer number of tasks you are faced with daily ( and I suspect you are not alone), should not despair there are some simple and very effective habits you can develop to help you.
I must stress the ideas are simple however forming a new habit is anything but.
Habit as described in the Oxford English dictionary as” an addictive practice” and addictive practices are incredibly hard to change. But change you must and with determination you can make significant inroads in 28 days.
Here’s how to get started.
Firstly the confession “I’m addicted to the bad practice of doing low priority tasks first”. Say it out loud! Why not face the fear, the fear of change.
Don’t allow your focus to be distracted as many do daily by the seemingly endless list of tasks that hit your To Do list every morning and throughout the day.
A is for important!
Here’s a start. Determine what are the most important tasks and give them an A rating. These are essentially tasks that have the greatest consequence if not done on time. Always determine a task’s importance by first assessing it’s consequence of not doing it.
Let’s consider this a little more.
Firstly the consequences are determined by you, and not others. Frequently the pressure applied by others is the single determinant in whether your task gets done. Don’t let this happen.
Now I do live in the real world too and accept that many of you have bosses and when they want something done it needs to be done, often there and then. This is normal and understandable.
However let’s be entirely honest and at the end of today write down for example, the number of emails you responded to today.
Secondly write down the number that had “serious consequences” for not being done. How many have you got?
Now analyse how many of these emails you read. Why? How many were simply cc’d to you? Is it necessary to read them all?
I have a very good friend of mine who until recently ran a multi billion euro business and has changed company. When he was sorting through his emails to prepare them for his successor he looked at the number of emails he had in his folder he named CC.
He had a habit of never reading emails cc’d to him. The folder now numbered over 5, 000 emails. Guess what, nobody noticed! There were no consequences!
Try it, it will significantly reduce your time, and stress.
So now that you have identified you’re A tasks, get started on them and tackle them until they are completed. No distractions.
Don’t worry about the other 97 things to do (we’ll deal with them in the next article) , until you have completed the 3 A tasks that have the greatest consequence to you and your business.
This is the skill all highly effective people have and with patience and determination you can also learn this skill.
A is for importance
A is also for ACTION, so start now and identify from you list the 3 most important tasks you can complete today that will have the greatest significance to you and your business.
Best of luck
