Stop Prioritizing To Achieve Time Management Success

Prioritizing by level of importance is a major problem for many people trying to achieve success with time management.

Time management trainers still pull the wool over your eyes with the old-fashioned technique of prioritizing by importance. Another problem area is scheduling activities to time. And a third problem is using weekly to-do lists.

In this article I will explain the problem of prioritizing by importance. Having just gone against the grain of traditional time management, you will have a glimmer of hope, and a dashing of skepticism. Hope because you know normal time management systems are a pain. And Skepticism because what I'm going to show you is not common.

Naturally, the 'time flies' phenomenon is great if you're in 'the zone' of productivity and life satisfaction. But how do you juggle all the deadlines, resources, and other people to find the balance?

And you have the problem of combining your social life with your career development, because we all know that modern lifestyles are crossing the border between your professional time management, and your social life.

Weekends are a great time to catch up o life's basic necessities. Because the week is so hectic. But imagine a handful of chores including cooking, filing in some documents, getting the pet to the vet, mowing the grass. The chores easily stack up. How can you really prioritize it all?

Have you tried prioritizing a list of things to do when you have dozens of things to do? It gets messy doesn't it? You try to arrange the order to decide on the most important thing. And you go and do that first. The thing is that areas of life get neglected because there isn't enough time to do everything when you prioritize by importance. Some things are always low on the list.

If you organized everything by level of importance you will end up rushing around putting out fires because you neglected things until they were practically emergencies, such as cutting the grass (forest!) or exercising, or organizing the files on your computer.

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.

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.

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.

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 systems you live by.

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