Just found this great article on time management by TentBlogger: My Time Management 101. Definitely worth a read.
Every now and then I try categorising my tasks as:
- Urgent & Important
- Urgent & Not Important
- Not Urgent But Important
- Not Urgent & Not Important
but end up with everything being ‘Urgent & Imporant’ or ‘Not Urgent But Important’. I guess everything seems important to me! Is that because I only do important things (probably not) or just that I have difficulty seeing anything as not important?
For example:
- making that update to a client’s website is obviously important and needs to be done as soon as possible (though isn’t necessarily urgent)
- however putting an invoice I’ve just paid through our bookkeeping software can wait indefinitely, sovaldi sale but is still important – after all we need to keep our accounts up-to-date so we know where are financially
Both of those I would put in the ‘Not Urgent But Important’ box, but it’s clear which one needs to get done first. Problem is I end up with 50+ tasks in the ‘Not Urgent But Important’ box and then I start struggling with how categorising them in that way helps me. Oh dear, time for some time management angst…
Actually, the important thing is that I know what needs doing. I’ve got a system that I trust to record all my tasks, and, yes there’s a lot of them, but they’re not going to get forgotten. I just need to review the list regularly and make sure that the most important things get done first.