Magnitude, Urgency and Importance
(Sorry about delay in getting this posting up, I was distracted by the elections. I’m a political junkie among other things. I needed to help get out the vote. As discussed below, this was a large task, with real importance, and increasing urgency as election day approached. Some would say, the best time management approach would be to not do anything, but that is where personal values enter the discussion – but that is a topic for another day. -etn)
Every day we have choices to make. Every day we are faced with more things to do than we can.
We have big projects and we have small ones. We have urgent projects and those that could slip a while, as long as they got done, perhaps tomorrow, perhaps next week.
And we have project that are important and those that while nice are not necessarily important.
These three characteristics of Magnitude, Urgency and Importance are central distinctions in your battle to better use your time. To manage anything implies making choices. And making choices requires some set of characteristics we can use to make appropriate decisions. For purposes of time management these are the three primary measurements, similar to height, depth and width in measuring a package.
By magnitude, we are talking about how long a project might take to complete. Some projects could be as short as making a telephone call or sending and email. Others may require many hours, or days, or even weeks to complete.
Long projects need to be evaluated in terms of the number of hours required to accomplish in its entirety and usually a more specific break down in reference to the critical sub parts of the overall project. Depending on the circumstances and your own predisposition, you may find yourself diving into a large project and forgetting everything else. Or perhaps you want to get all the little projects done first. In which case, you tend to put off the big one. Kind of reminds me of that big term paper when I was in school. I’d often let it wait until the last days when it had to get done or else.
When you schedule a large project, before or after smaller projects isn’t important from a size perspective. What is important is that you develop the ability to estimate realistically the amount of time a large project will take. Ideally, that would include estimating the time each of the major sub parts would take as well.
We tend to fool ourselves about this. So unless you have a well developed sense of the time required for a project, be prepared at initially double the anticipated time required on larger projects for planning purposes. The odds are, you will find ways to use the extra time.
Urgency is the second criteria. If you need to get the bills paid today before incurring additional late charges, paying bills is urgent. If you have an appointment with a client, that is urgent. If you need to draft an advertising campaign that due in the next week or so, it may not be urgent. In the day to day sense, Urgency is like trump in a card game like bridge or 500. It makes a topic that might not otherwise be important rise to the top, because it must get done. When evaluating to do’s, the items that are urgent necessarily need to be flagged.
The last category is the important. While paying bills may be urgent and may also be essential for your business to stay alive, it’s usually not that high in importance. More important may be doing some long term planning, investigating a new product line or even recruiting or training a part time assistant.
The quandary in time management, particularly for the micro business person is that important things are often not all that urgent. They can get put off to another day, and often are. As we will see in later installments, finding the time to identify and do the important things is the crux of successful time management.
Till next time. etn