Mastering Your Time
| Often the business leaders we work with have a hard time understanding how much of their day can simply vanish into thin air, leaving them with a list of tasks at the end of the day, often longer than when they started. The first step is to differentiate between what tasks are urgent versus important, then prioritising those to achieve daily, weekly, monthly and longer-term goals. |
An urgent task is something that if not completed by the end of the day, or in the next few hours, will have a serious negative impact on the business (like a major client project or a publication deadline). These are often unavoidable and require leadership involvement. Approximately 20% of the average week is spent focused on these tasks classified as urgent/important.
The next level of priority goes to those activities that add the highest value to your organisation. These are not someone else’s priorities, nor are they your “distractor” or “escape” tasks like checking emails, or re-arranging your file names. These are the tasks that will make a real difference to the business, either in the short / medium or long term.
On the quadrant below, these high value tasks would often be defined as not urgent/important. They relate to areas such as strategy, planning, and people. Research has shown that these tasks often get as little as 3% of the total time allocated to them – which can have serious long term repercussions if continuously overlooked.
So how do you spend most of your time?
Is it on other people’s priorities with tasks that are not important, like 60% of other professionals?
Recognising and taking ownership of your time is one of the fundamental skills to learn as you begin to navigate the more complex role of leadership and people management. As a challenge, download the Work Day Audit and track where you spend your time over one week. You may be highly surprised or horrified by what you find. The best thing about this – you can then fix it!
Once you have identified your time killers, set your weekly schedule to control how and where you spend your time, leaving 20% free to deal with the urgent/important matters as they arise.
Sean Martyn
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