Urgency: the natural way to prioritize?

Ever since Charles Hummel wrote his classic 1967 essay The Tyranny of the Urgent, urgency has had a bad press in the time management world. Received time management wisdom has long been that prioritizing should be by importance, with urgency as a side-show at best. We’re all by now familiar with Stephen Covey’s Four Quadrants, which gives Important two of the “good” quadrants while Urgent is only allowed one “good” quadrant and then only because it shares it with Important.

The questions I have are “Does Prioritizing by Urgency deserve its bad reputation?” and its corollary “Is Prioritizing by Importance all that it’s cracked up to be?”

If you construct a To-Do list in which all the tasks relate to your commitments (and every to-do list should be constructed on that basis), then everything on that list ultimately has to be done. You have, in other words, to have the intention to meet the specifications that go with each of your commitments. If you don’t have that intention, it’s not a commitment. And if it’s not a commitment it shouldn’t be on your to-do list.

Having accepted that everything on your to-do list has to be done, then the easiest and most direct way of getting through the list would be a simple First In First Out method. You do the list in the order in which tasks get written on the list. Importance makes no difference to the order, because if everything has to be done everything is equally important.

Of course we all know that this FIFO method wouldn’t work, and the reason it wouldn’t work is because tasks have different degrees of urgency. Urgency is what makes it necessary for us to do one particular task before another regardless of where it’s written on the list.

Urgency is in fact the natural way to prioritize. We do things first because they need to be done first. The farmer sows the seed and later the crop appears. At one time sowing becomes urgent and at another reaping. There is no possible way of saying that sowing is more important than reaping or vice versa.

Why then does prioritizing by urgency have such a bad press? I think there are two reasons:

The first is that people tend to think of the degree of urgency a task has in terms of when the task needs to be finished, when in fact the urgency relates to when the task needs to be started. This misconception is one reason why Prioritizing by Urgency is so often equated with deadline-chasing.

The second is that in the complications of modern life people very rarely do actually prioritize by urgency. They only start to prioritize by urgency when their other methods, or lack of them, have failed. The result is the same as in the first reason: deadline-chasing.

Repetitive nature of work

The new DWM system is throwing up some interesting new perspectives. One that has struck me quite forcibly is the repetitive nature of most of my work. Previous time management systems have tended to disguise the number of times that one re-enters the same task on the list.

But DWM separates out re-entered tasks from new tasks, and rather to my surprise I discovered that the number of new tasks that I’m putting on the list is decidedly in the minority. For example, yesterday I re-entered 43 tasks and only added 11 new tasks.

This reinforces a point I have often made, which is that good systems are all important in being well-organised. If the majority of tasks are repetitious, then making sure that those tasks are being carried out as efficiently as possible will bring about huge time savings.

Procrastination and Abstract Tasks

There’s an interesting article in the Economist about how people procrastinate less when given concrete tasks, rather than ones which require abstract thinking. This could well be relevant to how we should phrase the tasks we write in Autofocus or Do It Tomorrow (or any other time management system).

http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12971028

As the team report in Psychological Science, in all three studies, those who were presented with concrete tasks and information responded more promptly than did those who were asked to think in an abstract way. Moreover, almost all the students who had been prompted to think in concrete terms completed their tasks by the deadline while up to 56% of students asked to think in abstract terms failed to respond at all.

Whakate Best of Web Award

The life-design website Whakate.com has recognised the Forum on this website as being one of the 30 best personal development and productivity resources the internet has to offer today.

See the full list of awards.

Keep It Complicated, Stupid!

One of the reasons I like the Time Timer (see previous post) is that it is elegantly simple. It does what it does and nothing else. There are no complicated switches and menus. No one however technologically challenged could possibly have any trouble working it.

This contrasts with my digital timer which has a vast array of different settings, which even after studying the instructions at length I’m not really comfortable with.

Guess which is the better for timing intervals?

I suspect that the Time Timer took a lot of thought to make it as simple as it is - a lot more thought in fact than went into the design of the digital timer.

This reminds me of something which has always struck me about discussions on the subject of Do It Tomorrow. People always want to make it more complicated. When they hit a snag, their solution is to complicate it. So they end up with an array of lists, reminders, plans and priorities which sound as if they will take more time to work than the work itself.

This is actually going in the wrong direction. Do It Tomorrow is a very simple system. All you need to work it is a page-a-day diary and a pen. There’s no need to plan your day, because the system produces your next day’s work automatically. And it provides a simple, easy way of checking that your work is in balance with your time.

When any system gets more and more complicated this is almost always a sign that a “work-around” is in progress. What this means is that it’s easier to work around a problem than to look at why that problem is happening in the first place. For instance if someone is being lazy about how they focus their work, then it is easier to introduce a new layer of complexity than to ask the searching questions that need to be asked.

Anyway, how could I improve the Time Timer? Well, I think it would be good to have it count-up as well as count-down, so we could just add a little button here, and it would be good to have a digital display as well - that would be easy if we made the main dial smaller. And if we’re making the main dial smaller, why not have two dials so we can time two things at once…?

Obligation a Cause of Procrastination

There’s an interesting article on the Wonder Women blog about a sense of obligation being one of the main causes of procrastination.

When I was in sixth grade, I took piano lessons. Each week, I would meet with my piano teacher and tried to fake my way through the assigned pieces that I had not practiced. I hated that I had to play certain songs for a certain period of time, even though I enjoyed the piano. Finally, I convinced my mom to let me quit. From that day on, I sat and played piano for about an hour a day.

The One Essential Resource For Surviving the Recession

It’s been amazing over these last few weeks how the world situation seems to have changed and fear taken over. I have no intention here of pontificating about the future. Like the vast majority of people, I have no idea what is going to happen.

In times of uncertainty like these in what can we trust? Can we trust our work? Probably not - a lot of jobs and businesses have already gone and more will follow. Can we trust our clients? No, they’re in the same position as we are. Can we trust the banks? I don’t have to answer that one! Can we trust our savings and pensions? They seem to be the things most at risk. Can we trust our politicians? There’s an old saying “No problem is so bad that government interference can’t make it worse.”

So is there anything we can trust? Yes, one thing. Ourselves. That is to say, our own ability to handle whatever life throws at us.

Well, we can trust it if we’ve got it. But what we have to realise is that the standard of self-management which is sufficient for the easy times is not going to be sufficient for the hard times. We can afford to waste time, be unfocused, drift along, be immersed in trivialities when there are easy pickings to be had. We can’t afford any of those things when the supplies start to dry up. When we deny reality, reality always comes back and hits us sooner or later.

I would suggest that time management and personal organisation - the subjects of this website - have now moved from being an optional extra to being a matter of survival. If you don’t have these skills already, you need them now. You may have got away with not having them in the past. You won’t get away with it over the coming months and years.

Schedule of Seminars

Related Article:

What It Takes to Be a Successful Coach

The Hidden Power of Procrastination

The price we pay for the things we succeed in doing is the things we leave undone.

I came across John Perry’s hilarious article Structured Procrastination the other day. It is in the finest tradition of humour which tells more truth than the serious articles. Another great exemplar in the time management field is J. Northcote Parkinson’s Parkinson’s Law.

Reading John Perry’s article cast light on something which had puzzled me for years. To describe what it is I have to go back to the first time management system I ever invented - something like twelve years ago. This was a form of open-ended To Do list. Unlike the standard advice about To Do lists I made no attempt to order it or prioritise it. Nor was I particularly careful about what I put into the list. Anything which occurred to me or crossed my mind went into the list. So the result would be a long list which contained everything I could think of. And as I thought of new stuff all the time, the list would grow rapidly.

Since the list was not prioritised in any way, my method of working the list was to go through it continually from one end to the other. Whenever an item “stood out” to me I would do it. Any recurrent items like “Email” would be re-entered at the end of the list once completed.

This type of To Do list was extremely efficient for getting a lot done. However the disadvantage was that a lot of items didn’t get done. Some items would stay on the list for weeks.

What I realised after reading John Perry’s article was that the items which don’t get done provide the motive power for what does get done. In other words the price we pay for the things we succeed in doing is the things we leave undone.

Interview by Luciano Passuello

Luciano Passuello has a interview with me on his blog Litemind today.

Interview with Taragh B

Some of you may be familiar with Taragh B’s lively videos on Youtube. I just happened to run into her at a party the other day and she took the opportunity to interview me:

The Closed List: Regaining Control Over Your Day

There’s a good article about closed lists on the Whakate site, which largely references my book Do It Tomorrow and an interview with myself.

Thinking Up New Ideas

One of the most important actions for anyone in an executive or managerial position is thinking. If you don’t leave yourself time to think then you are going to be working at far less than maximum effectiveness.

Ok, so you acknowledge the rightness of what I’ve just said, and you decide “I’m going to do some thinking”.

But what exactly do you do then?

Here’s some suggestions!

1. Set aside a specific time, perhaps half an hour, in which you sit down somewhere you can’t be interrupted. Use a blank pad of paper and write down every thought that comes to you. Don’t try to force it, and don’t worry if your thoughts dry up for a while.

2. Do the same, but this time with a mind mapping programme on your computer. The advantage of putting your thoughts into a mindmapper is that when you have finished you can arrange and group your thoughts logically.

3. With both the above methods, when you have finished the set time, go through the thoughts and evaluate them. Identify the ones that are “goers” and mark them up for action or further consideration.

4. Same again, but this time sit down with a mind mapping programme and construct and arrange the map as you go along. This is particularly useful when you have a specific problem or issue to think about.

5. If you have a specific issue to think about, try jotting down a few thoughts about it every day for a week. Don’t refer to your previous notes when you do this. By the end of the week you may find that your mind has come up with a lot of new insights.

6. You can use a similar method for making decisions. After doing all the necessary research, try arranging the possible solutions in order of preference (and don’t forget that “Do nothing” is usually one of the options). Do this every day for a week, without referring to your previous order of preference, and you will have a much better idea of what you really want.

7. When carrying out thinking as a group, it’s important to remember that groups don’t like people who rock the boat. So members who are unhappy about a proposal may say nothing because they don’t want to be seen to be opposing the majority. To get a good group solution it is essential that the thoughts of each individual are taken into consideration.

It’s Like Walking Across a Muddy Field: how to get rid of backlogs

I am re-issuing some old articles as blog entries partly in order to get a new audience for them, and partly in order to get all my articles in one place. This is the first.

There are basically two types of task which we are faced with during a typical day. First there is the type of task which either gets done or doesn’t get done. You either renew the car insurance or you don’t. You either paint the bedroom or you don’t. You either buy a new dress or you don’t. You either send your great aunt a birthday card or you don’t. The consequences of doing or not doing this type of task may range from the trivial to the momentous, but essentially they are one-offs.

Then there is the type of task which produces a backlog if it is not attended to. Dealing with paper is the classic example of this type of task. Have you ever noticed how paper has the strange tendency to breed if given the chance? Leave two bits of paper together overnight and miraculously when you come down in the morning you have a six-inch pile of papers in various stages of inaction. Leave the pile on its own for another 24 hours and you have an office full of piles of paper.

The modern age has produced an even worse backlog producer — the email. Leave your inbox for 24 hours and you will have hundreds of these little monsters clamouring for your attention. I have had clients who complain that they have literally thousands of emails they haven’t even got round to reading.

Other well-known backlog producers are phone calls, filing, and updating client records. There may be others that are peculiar to your life.

The real problem with backlogs is that they take you out of the present. Instead of dealing with today’s work, you are constantly trying to catch up. It’s the difference between walking along a well-defined path and walking across a muddy field. On the path you can walk freely, but in the field your boots get caked in mud and you have to put out more and more effort while going slower and slower.

Backlogs can make people feel hopeless. It may seem impossible to catch up. And even if you do catch up you may only find yourself almost immediately slipping back again.

So how can you deal with them once and for all?

STEP ONE — DRAW A LINE. Say to yourself “Everything that comes in from now on I will deal with immediately. And I will tackle the backlog bit by bit.” Ring fence the backlogs so that they don’t get any bigger.

STEP TWO — CLEAR INCOMING MATERIAL DAILY. The best way to deal with incoming paper, emails, phone calls, etc. is to have a check list which you go through several times a day. So I have a list which comprises about five items and I go through it checking each one off. I do this three times a day — first thing, after lunch and early evening. Because this keeps me right on top of all incoming material, I can sometimes get through the list in as little as ten minutes. More often it takes me an hour or more — but I don’t have any backlogs. The rest of my time is free to get on with creative work.

STEP THREE — REDUCE THE INCOMING VOLUME. One of the reasons backlogs build up in the first place is because we attract far too much inessential stuff. Chuck junk mail in the trash without even opening it. Cancel subscriptions for newsletters you don’t read (you DO read mine!). Don’t write off for things you don’t need. Keep asking yourself “Why am I receiving this?”.

STEP FOUR — GET RID OF THE BACKLOGS BIT BY BIT. If you do steps one and two correctly, your backlogs can now only get smaller. Don’t try to get rid of the lot in one go. Keep chipping away at them. With emails, try clearing one day at a time, starting with the oldest. With paper, try clearing it one subject at a time — such as all bank statements, then all bills, then all client letters and so forth.

Related article:

Back from Holiday

Joesgoals.com

In my posting Chaining: A Way to Keep Going I mentioned a useful website for keeping track of things you want to do every day: 

         Joesgoals.com

I’ve been using it quite a bit recently, and one thing it is absolutely brilliant at is keeping track of whether I succeed in finishing my Will Do list every day. As those of you who’ve read Do It Tomorrow know, I strongly recommend carrying out a diagnostic procedure if you fail to complete your Will Do list for more than a few days. The number of days depends on your particular circumstances, but I use 3 days myself. If you are using more than 5 days, you are fooling yourself!

Joesgoals allows you to have negative goals (i.e. things you don’t want to do) as well as positive goals. The chain then refers to the number of days you have refrained from doing the undesired behaviour (like smoking, eating chocolate cake, etc.). I put my Will Do list in as a negative goal - Not Complete Will Do List - so that the program shows up immediately if I’ve not completed the list for three days. I get a row of three red crosses!

Never underestimate the power of these types of visual reminders. I regard getting even one cross as a major disaster, and would do almost anything to avoid three in a row. Yes, I might even exercise discrimination in what I put on the list in the first place!

Being busy is a form of laziness - lazy thinking and indiscriminate action. (Tim Ferris, The 4-Hour Working Week)

More on Parkinson & Pareto

I’m continuing reading The 4-Hour Work Week and came across this quotation which I absolutely love, so I thought I’d share it with you:

1. Doing something unimportant well does not make it important.
   
2. Requiring a lot of time does not make a task important.

Pareto meets Parkinson

I’m reading Timothy Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Work Week at the moment, and I notice that he recommends using the Pareto Principle combined with Parkinson’s Law in order to focus one’s work so that one is achieving the maximum in the minimum time. This is very similar to what I have just been writing about in my posting DIT And Focus.

You may be more familiar with the Pareto Principle as the 80/20 Rule. This states that 80% of results are produced by 20% of the effort. This can be applied in many different ways. In a time management context you could say that 20% of your tasks produce 80% of your results. Or in a marketing context, it could be phrased as 20% of your customers produce 80% of your income. Note that the corollary is also true: 80% of your customers produce only 20% of your income!

By concentrating on the 20% that produce the results and jettisoning the other 80% you can greatly increase your productivity.

I expect most of you are familiar with Parkinson’s Law:

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion

As I have often said, if you are struggling to fit all your work into the day, the solution is to set limits on your working hours. This forces you to be more selective in what you do and more efficient in how you do it.

The Do It Tomorrow system works best with set working hours. If you carry out the audit procedure correctly whenever you fail to complete your Will Do list within your set hours for more than a few days, then you will be forced to narrow and define your focus. Always try to identify the 20% of actions which bring in that valuable 80% of results.

And if you gradually reduce the length of your working day, the effect will be even more pronounced. I don’t expect many of us will get down to the 4-Hour Week Tim Ferriss dangles before our eyes - but do we have any real doubt that our focus could do with a bit of improvement? How far can we go in the right direction if we use these two principles - Pareto and Parkinson?

Top 10 Tips on How to Delegate

Delegation is one of the secrets of good time management. But many people are reluctant to delegate because it often seems more trouble than it’s worth. When people you are depending on forget important tasks or miss deadlines it can be more than frustrating - it can be positively damaging. So here’s my Top 10 Tips on how to delegate effectively. And if you have a tip which you think should be in the Top 10, then tell us about it in the Comments.

1) Ask yourself which parts of your work can only be done by you. Then aim to delegate as much of the rest as possible so that you are free to make the most of your own work.

2) Never delegate even the simplest task without saying when you want it completed by.

3) Where possible, get the person to set the deadline themselves. Make it clear that you expect them to keep to it.

4) Always put a follow-up reminder in your schedule or Task Diary to check that the work has been done. Everytime you fail to do this, you have lost control of that part of your work.

5) Always chase work immediately if it hasn’t been done by the time you requested it. If you don’t, they will think it’s not important.

6) Break down large tasks into stages and set deadlines for each. Spell out what should have been achieved at each deadline. Don’t say “Let me know in a week’s time how you’re getting on”. Instead say “Send me the draft for the first section by lunchtime Friday.”

7) Remember you can delegate upwards and sideways as well as downwards, and the same rules apply when you do.

8) When someone overruns a deadline don’t say “Why haven’t you done it?”. Instead say: “I’m not interested in why you haven’t done it. What I want to know is when you will have done it.”

9) Remember no one is going to give the work they are doing for you more importance than you give it. So if they think you don’t care about it, why should they?

10) Remember that people whose time management is bad tend to react to what is making the most noise at the time. The way to get them to give your work priority is to make more noise than the other calls on their time.

If anyone consistently fails to do the work you are asking them to do in spite of your keeping to these rules, then you should cease to use their services. You are not doing them any favours by ignoring their poor performance.

Noguchi Filing System

A remark today by a reader in my Discussion Forum reminded me of something which had intrigued me in the past but which I had never followed up. This is the Noguchi Filing System. I was intrigued by it because it is in some ways similar to the filing system which I use myself and often recommend, though I developed this before I had heard of Noguchi.

In both systems the idea is that files are put on a shelf rather than in a filing cabinet, and the most recently used file is always replaced at the left end of the shelf so that files are in the order they were last used. This results in much faster retrieval of files because the most used files are always to be found towards the left of the shelf.

Where the systems differ is that I keep papers in fairly conventional subject files, while Noguchi suggests opening a folder (actually a cut-down large envelope) for every document.

I was very interested to know how this would work in practice. It is one of those counter-intuitive systems which can only be judged by trying it out.

So having armed myself with a large number of C4 envelopes, I started filing the Noguchi way this afternoon. And actually my first impression is that it works quite well, especially with the type of document one never quite knows what to do with. 

Looking at my shelf, from the left I now have the following documents each filed in its own envelope with a description written down the right hand edge, where I can see it easily:

• A leaflet giving changes to my bank’s standard tariff
• A pamphlet from my bank giving “important information” about my business account
• A pamphlet giving the Terms & Conditions for my business bank account
• My list of commonly used phone numbers
• A newspaper article about “Discretionary Portfolio Management”
• The latest copy of my Parish Magazine
• The latest weekly “pew sheet” from my church

Since I’ve only just filed these, they are not yet in “last-used” order, but I feel that I am now in control of them and can retrieve them easily. As you will have seen, none of these are the sort of thing which fits easily into a conventional file (which is the reason why they were lying around in the first place!) So far then, a definite improvement.

What can be done now?

I am often asked a question about how one choses what items you should put in the Task Diary for tomorrow. My answer is always that you should always be as up-to-date as possible with all current projects. Therefore any actions which can be taken now should be put in the task diary.

This adheres to the basic “Do It Tomorrow” principle that prioritising should not normally be done at the task level. It should be done at the project level.

What tends to happen is that when people get under pressure they tend to try to prioritise tasks. This is rarely very successful because all that happens is that tasks get put off to days in the future. But those future days are going to be just as full as today is.

Keeping on top of projects is the best way to ensure that you are forced to prioritise at the project level. If you can’t keep on top of all your projects, then you need to look at your current projects and decide which ones should be de-activated, either temporarily or permanently.

Before I wrote DIT, I used to recommend people to use the question “What needs to be done now?” with reference to projects. In full the question would be something like:

If this report is going to be written by the end of the month, what needs to be done now?”

Nowadays the question I recommend is:

If this report is going to be written by the end of the month, what can be done now?

The effect of the first question is to push action back until it needs to be done. This makes it very vulnerable to unexpected interruptions. Actually there’s no such thing as “unexpected interruptions”. Interruptions are a fact of life. Leaving action until it needs to be done tends to result in deadline pressure and over commitment.

The second question on the other hand has the effect of encouraging you to start action at the beginning of the time available for its completion. This gives you much more leeway if things go wrong (which they will). It is also a strong disincentive to over committing yourself.

Yaro Starak: How to Remain Productive When You Feel Like Giving Up

There was a great post on Yaro Starak’s blog “The Entrepreneur’s Journey” yesterday entitled How To Remain Productive When You Feel Like Giving Up.