Prioritization Insights

Prioritization

I’ve had lots of discussions with co-workers about prioritization and time management.  It’s an interesting challenge that all of us face.  The busier we all get, the more difficult it becomes to decide what’s important and needs attention, and what tasks could be ignored, deferred or delegated.

There’s been a lot written about this topic, from the Harvard Business School to the American Management Association to Steven Covey.  The details might vary a little bit from entity to entity, but the overall general concept is the same.

            Source:  RRResearch: Important but not urgent http://ow.ly/b8NIk

This graphic breaks issues and tasks into four quadrants.  Note the vertical axis is “Urgency”, the horizontal is “Importance”.

1.     Not Important And Not Urgent.  These are time wasters, interruptions, co-worker visits, social phone calls, etc.  These need to be managed and minimized so as to not waste valuable time.

2.     Not Important But Urgent.  These issues are the time wasters and attention diverters some people really get bogged down with.  They’re really not important in the greater scheme of things, but people get involved and sidetracked because of the urgency of the issue.  Delegate or disregard, or these kinds of non-important issues will consume too much valuable time.  I often use the rule that “if they won’t be important two weeks from now, they’re not important now….”

3.     Important and Urgent.  These issues do need attention.  Now.  Something’s “on fire”.  Today’s crisis.  Maybe you can delegate a response, but the importance of the situation requires your involvement, at least at a coordination level.  These are the kinds of issues that cause us to lose control of our day and all the tasks that we’d carefully organized to get done. 

4.     Important and Not Urgent.  This is arguably the most important quadrant, and the one most overlooked.  The other three boxes are reactive, this one is the only area that is proactive.  This is the place where long term organizing, planning, strategizing, and thinking takes place.  The problem here of course is that because it isn’t Urgent its so very easy to defer, postpone, reschedule, and put off.  Then tomorrow’s crisis comes along, and pretty soon these all-important tasks end up never happening.  You allowed all your time to be consumed by today’s interruptions and demands, and never found the time for the most important part of your job.  Proactively creating, managing, and innovating.

Sometimes managers appear too detached from the day-to-day crisises, and perhaps they are.  Or, they may be intentionally trying to disengage from all those urgent-but-not very-important issues that always seem to be taking place in deference to what is really much more important to the success of the operation and the business.

It’s very insightful to regularly ask yourself if you’re actually being proactive in your job as a manager, or just reactive.  Reactive actions are rarely the course of leaders.

(And then there’s delegation skills to master, and then PROCRASTINATION to overcome….)