Thought For The Day
To guarantee success, act as
if it were impossible to fail-
Dorothea Brande
Dorothea Brande
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Reclaim Your Life
Do you look at your growing to-do list and feel an overwhelming sensation because you do not know where to start? Do you have panic attacks when you review the things that you have planned out for the day? Console yourself. These are part and parcel of today’s hectic life where everybody seems to be juggling too many balls in the air simultaneously; multi tasking indeed has become the order of the day. One very often feels, at the end of a busy day, that he has accomplished just a fraction of what needs to be done. This situation is further messed up when you realize that the important projects that you know, will make a sea change in your life, are lying untouched. The other side of the coin is that because of this mindless chase, your family and personal pursuits are bearing the brunt. Peter Drucker, the management doyen has termed the biggest problem in modern life as ‘getting caught up in the trivia’. It would seem that the minutiae are ruling our life. If you carefully note, there are many instances during the day which causes you to abandon the plan that you have carefully made for the day and instead do what seems to be important at the moment. A text message that suddenly popped up, your secretary reminding you of a call that needs to be made, an email from a long lost buddy or an urgent message from a colleague, are such instances. The best way to avoid drifting into trivia is to have clear priorities. When your objectives are clear, you will be able to tell when a particular disruption is less important. You can literally catch yourself drifting into trivia. Time management skills are as vital to the marketing professional as it is to the CEO of a multi billion dollar company. Effective time managers realize the naked truth that, however much resourceful one might be, one just cannot do everything. You have to be selective about the tasks you do during the day and delegate the others. If it means disrupting the flow, let it be. Great things are not achieved always by the most popular man. Prioritizing demands taking control over your choices and a clear decision to spend more time on tasks that are valuable, and less time on the ones that are not as important.
So how do we go about Prioritizing?
The most common method of prioritization is the ABCD prioritization. We assign an ‘A’ to ongoing projects that you are actively working on, as well as important long-term projects that you want to continue, moving forward. Thus if a project is assigned A, it is something so important, time should be committed towards the progress of it, on a regular basis. Projects that are ‘under review’ would be coming into the B quadrant. While they are important, they are not so important enough to allot time for them in the upcoming week. This categorization is not cast in stone. One can always revisit this decision during the next weekly planning session. Thus, urgent but non important projects will be relegated to B or even C. This should be considered as productive procrastination. Since it is reviewed once a week, there should be no danger of it lying unattended. C category projects are not worthy of your time and effort during the upcoming week. Finally there are the D category projects. Tasks put in the back burner, to put it bluntly. They are off your priority list. Once the categorization is done, it is time to do a further division among the tasks. First focus on the A assigned tasks and assign individual priority rank values to the top 5- 10 tasks: A1 should be for the most important, A2 for the next most important, and so on. If two tasks are equally important, give both of them the same grading. By now you would have noticed that you are not getting weighed down by the burgeoning number of To-Dos. A tip here would not be out of place. If the task list in ‘A’ category is still daunting, you should consider moving them to B or C category. You have already planned for every available time. Some tasks will have to be rescheduled. Another tip is not to try your hand at more than 2 projects at the same time. Start with one and work on it till it is completed or if there are some elements of work in other projects that can be done simultaneously, do that but save the vital time- taking work for some time later. The benefits of the work allocation should start to trickle in fast. Initially, you feel more focused and hence more productive, and your stress levels are less. Then you begin to take rapid strides on the crucial projects that make a real difference to your business. Once these things are in place, slowly the rewards and recognitions ought to come. And finally you get more time to spend with your family and friends; the quality time you manage to spend will bring peace of mind and will work as a de-stressor.
Do you look at your growing to-do list and feel an overwhelming sensation because you do not know where to start? Do you have panic attacks when you review the things that you have planned out for the day? Console yourself. These are part and parcel of today’s hectic life where everybody seems to be juggling too many balls in the air simultaneously; multi tasking indeed has become the order of the day. One very often feels, at the end of a busy day, that he has accomplished just a fraction of what needs to be done. This situation is further messed up when you realize that the important projects that you know, will make a sea change in your life, are lying untouched. The other side of the coin is that because of this mindless chase, your family and personal pursuits are bearing the brunt. Peter Drucker, the management doyen has termed the biggest problem in modern life as ‘getting caught up in the trivia’. It would seem that the minutiae are ruling our life. If you carefully note, there are many instances during the day which causes you to abandon the plan that you have carefully made for the day and instead do what seems to be important at the moment. A text message that suddenly popped up, your secretary reminding you of a call that needs to be made, an email from a long lost buddy or an urgent message from a colleague, are such instances. The best way to avoid drifting into trivia is to have clear priorities. When your objectives are clear, you will be able to tell when a particular disruption is less important. You can literally catch yourself drifting into trivia. Time management skills are as vital to the marketing professional as it is to the CEO of a multi billion dollar company. Effective time managers realize the naked truth that, however much resourceful one might be, one just cannot do everything. You have to be selective about the tasks you do during the day and delegate the others. If it means disrupting the flow, let it be. Great things are not achieved always by the most popular man. Prioritizing demands taking control over your choices and a clear decision to spend more time on tasks that are valuable, and less time on the ones that are not as important.
So how do we go about Prioritizing?
The most common method of prioritization is the ABCD prioritization. We assign an ‘A’ to ongoing projects that you are actively working on, as well as important long-term projects that you want to continue, moving forward. Thus if a project is assigned A, it is something so important, time should be committed towards the progress of it, on a regular basis. Projects that are ‘under review’ would be coming into the B quadrant. While they are important, they are not so important enough to allot time for them in the upcoming week. This categorization is not cast in stone. One can always revisit this decision during the next weekly planning session. Thus, urgent but non important projects will be relegated to B or even C. This should be considered as productive procrastination. Since it is reviewed once a week, there should be no danger of it lying unattended. C category projects are not worthy of your time and effort during the upcoming week. Finally there are the D category projects. Tasks put in the back burner, to put it bluntly. They are off your priority list. Once the categorization is done, it is time to do a further division among the tasks. First focus on the A assigned tasks and assign individual priority rank values to the top 5- 10 tasks: A1 should be for the most important, A2 for the next most important, and so on. If two tasks are equally important, give both of them the same grading. By now you would have noticed that you are not getting weighed down by the burgeoning number of To-Dos. A tip here would not be out of place. If the task list in ‘A’ category is still daunting, you should consider moving them to B or C category. You have already planned for every available time. Some tasks will have to be rescheduled. Another tip is not to try your hand at more than 2 projects at the same time. Start with one and work on it till it is completed or if there are some elements of work in other projects that can be done simultaneously, do that but save the vital time- taking work for some time later. The benefits of the work allocation should start to trickle in fast. Initially, you feel more focused and hence more productive, and your stress levels are less. Then you begin to take rapid strides on the crucial projects that make a real difference to your business. Once these things are in place, slowly the rewards and recognitions ought to come. And finally you get more time to spend with your family and friends; the quality time you manage to spend will bring peace of mind and will work as a de-stressor.