Page 48 - Time Management

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Lining Up Your Ducks: Prioritize!
what might you have written if it were a workday?
As you ponder these questions, your responses may lead
you to insights and spark the will to prioritize things differently. 33
You may even wish to create a personal set of criteria for decid-
ing which items really belong in which categories.
The ABCs of Prioritizing
These approaches can facilitate your prioritizing:
• Label every task you list in your organizer with a letter
value. An assumption: you have some sort of organizer,
either electronic or paper. (More about this indispensable
tool in Chapter 10.) Just doing this may prompt you to
rearrange the time order of some of the things you have
“penciled in.”
• Fill out a to-do list in random order, then label each item
with a rating. This list should drive your scheduling.
• Equip your desk with a three- or four-tray filing system.
Label the top tray the A tray, the next down the B tray,
and so forth. Place each project, etc., in a folder and file it
in the appropriate tray. (Some computer programs allow
you to do this with electronic files.) Every morning,
review the A’s and B’s, moving items up as needed.
Check through the C’s and D’s every Friday morning to
detect tasks that you need to move up.

Is It Critical or Urgent?
This important distinction, when assigning priorities, is a
matter of time. A task is urgent when it must be done imme-
diately. Such a task may be less important, in the long run, than other,
more critical (that is, extremely important) tasks, but its importance is
magnified by the fact that it’s extremely time-sensitive. So it’s always
critical to schedule urgent tasks first, even if the importance of the task
(all other things being equal) would make it a B rather than an A.