How Do We Tell How Urgent A Task Is?

It’s easy to tell how urgent a task is if we have the boss or a client on our back threatening dire things if it’s not completed by the deadline. But the majority of the tasks we do during the day are not like that. They don’t have precise deadlines and they are generally unsupervised by anyone except ourselves.

How urgent is it to check my email?

How urgent is it to write the next article on my blog?

How urgent is my daily exercise?

How urgent is it to repaint the dining room?

How urgent is it to call my aunt?

How urgent is it to start preparing for Christmas? (my wife has started already!)

How urgent is it to tidy my desk?

How urgent is it to start writing a book if the deadline is six months away?

How urgent is it to write the briefing papers for next month’s meeting?

If you start trying to prioritize by urgency you will find that you are faced with this kind of question over and over again. It’s here that one is tempted to fall back into prioritizing by importance: writing the book is more important than tidying my desk therefore I will write the book in preference to tidying my desk. The problem with that approach is that writing the book is going to continue to be more important than tidying my desk for the next six months, so I may end up with a very untidy desk.

The answer to the question “How do we tell how urgent a task is?” is that in the majority of cases we can’t. Some tasks have obvious negative consequences if we delay them like missing a bus or missing the next issue of the newspaper, but for most there is no “correct” degree of urgency.

The fact is that we have to allocate the urgency ourselves. So how urgent is checking our email? The answer to that will depend on whether we have a policy of checking our email once a day or three times a day or every time a new email arrives. That’s up to us. How urgent is repainting our dining room? That depends on how long we are prepared to put up with the existing decor. Again that’s up to us. How urgent is our daily exercise? That depends on whether we have a set time during the day or not. And - you guessed it - that’s up to us!

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.

Reminder: Donations

Just a reminder that everything on this site is free with the exception of my books (and one of those is a free download). That gives you access to one of the most powerful time management systems, hundreds of articles, a forum to ask questions and discuss your time management problems or ideas, and frequent new articles and updates.

There are no ads on the site, apart from the books. OK, there may be one or two lurking in dark corners which I haven’t spotted. These are from the days when there were ads on the site. Whenever I come across one I remove it. They produce virtually no income in any case.

The site does cost money to maintain and a vast amount of time too. So if you want to show your appreciation, don’t forget the donation box in the margin. I’m very grateful to those who have donated in the past, but I haven’t had even one donation for months now!

Anything you feel like giving will be greatly appreciated. And to make it easy, you don’t even have to go to the margin - here’s the box!

Reminder: Registration Expiry

This is just to remind you that the number of registrations for the Forum is limited to 250 and that number is currently filled.

This means that every time I get a request for a new registration I delete the existing account which has been unused for the longest time. The current longest one has been unused for 1 year 73 days.

So if you haven’t used your account for a while and want to make sure it doesn’t lapse, all you have to do is log-in to the account. You don’t have to make a post.

If the number of requests for accounts rises considerably so that the unused period before deletion gets unacceptably small, I shall have to shell out some extra cash and upgrade my account with Squarespace. Mind you, that would also allow on-site registration so that would be some compensation!

Past Articles

When I was preparing the Articles tab, I went back and looked through all the past articles in order to make sure they were tagged as Articles. In the process I came across quite a few old articles which I think I think are worth reviving. Some of them I’d even forgotten that I’d written!

Here’s a short selection of the ones I like best:

From Pipe Dream to Project

The Problem with Deadlines

Vague Goals

Friction

Feeling Good

SuperFocus instructions now in Korean

I have added a Korean translation to the SuperFocus instructions. Many thanks to Seokhwan Kim for translating them.

Another mental strength exercise

I gave one suggested exercise in my post yesterday about Exercising the Choice Muscle, and there are several more suggestions from readers in the Comments.

Here’s one exercise which I don’t think anyone else has come up with yet, though it’s very simple and straightforward.

Write a list of five random tasks

Do them in the order in which they are written down

Then write another list, adding one more task, i.e. six

Repeat regularly adding one more to the total tasks on the list each time

You may not do any other tasks while doing this exercise. If you fail to complete the  tasks or do them in the wrong order, then next time reduce the number of tasks until you do succeed in doing them.

Exercising the choice muscle

In my recent article Taking the Easy Choice I suggested that the ability to make difficult choices was something that could be improved by training.

So I’d like to hear suggestions for exercises that would strengthen our ability to do this.

There’s one in my book Get Everything Done. You nominate one task you are going to do the next day. It can be something you need to do anyway, or it can be something completely arbitrary. Start with something easy. If you succeed in doing it, then you choose something a little bit more difficult for the following day. And so on day by day, getting a little bit harder each time. Whenever you fail to do the day’s task (no excuses are accepted), you have to reduce the difficulty of the task for the next day. The idea is that you build yourself up to the point where you can rely on yourself to do even the most difficult tasks when you say you are going to do them.

Can anyone think up some more exercises which would be as effective or even more effective? Answers in the Comments.

New Menu Item: Articles

I have added a new menu item for Articles. This accesses the blog category Articles, which shows the contents of the blog with all the minor posts removed, such as administrative messages, news items and passing thoughts or queries.

So by using this tab you can quickly get to the important stuff on the website. Try it and see.

Taking the Easy Choice

You have to make a very difficult call to an unsatisfied customer. Do you:

a) make the call?

b) tidy your desk?

c) play a game on your iPhone/computer?

If your normal response to a situation like this is a) then you don’t need to read this post, except perhaps to wonder what on earth the problem is supposed to be.

If you normally go for b) then you usually take the easy choice, and it would be a good idea to learn to strengthen your choice muscle.

If c) would be your reaction, then you are not just taking the easy choice - you are withdrawing from the game altogether. You badly need to make stronger choices.

One of the most common characteristics of bad time managers is that they have a definite tendency to take the easy choice.

Taking the easy choice results in things like:

• Reluctance to go outside one’s comfort zone
• Procrastination
• Proliferation of busy work
• Difficulty in taking decisions where there is no easy choice
• Making excuses
• Falling into the activity trap

This is something that can improve with training. And it’s well-worth doing. Strengthening one’s ability to take the more difficult choice will make a lot of difference in life.

Organizing a waste of time?

There’s an interesting article in Business Insider called Guess What? You’re Wasting Your Time If You Organize by Michael Scrage of the Harvard Business Review.

Do you agree with him?

Books

I’ve now added Books as a tab in the main menu. Do have a look at it. You can buy my books Get Everything Done and Still Have Time to Play and Do It Tomorrow there, plus my recommendations for other books on the subject of “time management and personal organization”. I have interpreted that quite loosely, so you will find books like The E-Myth Revisited and What Color Is Your Parachute there. Basically most of them are the books that I have found most helpful in my life and work, plus a few highly recommended by colleagues and clients (or even written by them). There are also links provided by Amazon to similar books which are well worth exploring.

Re-design

If you’ve been to this website before, you will have noticed that there has been a major redesign of the website today.

My aim has been to reduce the clutter on the pages and to make it easier to read the text without distractions. This is important as this is very much a text-based website. As part of this re-design I’ve removed the left-hand margin and combined the contents with the right-hand margin. In the process I’ve got rid of some of the margin items.

At the same time I have made the blog the Home page since it is the main vehicle for new writing. I’ve renamed the old static Home page as “About”, and I intend to do a major re-write of that page in the near future.

I also intend to make “Books” a main menu item.

Be prepared for more changes after I’ve lived with the new design for a while.

Consistency - 2

Some people seem to have misunderstood my post about consistency yesterday to be about using some system or method consistently, rather than jumping from one to another. Perhaps I didn’t make it as clear as I should have, but what I was actually writing about was producing consistent results.

Of course jumping from one method to another is a good way of ensuring that you won’t produce consistent results, just as jumping from one network marketing scheme to another is a good way of ensuring that you’ll never make any money from network marketing. But the method we use isn’t what I was concerned about. What I wanted to make as my point was that the test of any time management method is that it delivers consistent results.

That is why I followed up the post about consistency yesterday with one about “What to look out for” in respect of my new time management system. What that post was saying is that you will know when I have really succeeded in finalizing the system because I will start to produce consistent results as a result of using it. I gave several indicators of the type of consistent results to watch out for.

What to look out for

I’ve posted several times that I am nearing completion of the development of the Final Version, and each time further problems have surfaced and the completion has been put off. This hasn’t been a question of procrastination - simply of getting it right.

So rather than post yet again to say that I feel I’m nearly there, I thought I’d give you some indicators so that you can tell for yourself how near I’m getting.

Watch out for these:

• Daily blog posts
• Revival and reorganization of my newsletter
• A reduction in my personal activity on the Discussion Forum.
• Changes to the website
• A new programme of seminars
• New initiatives (such as videos, teleconferences, partnerships, etc)
• An increase in external interest

I’m not saying that all of these will necessarily happen, but when you see several of these signs then you will know that the day is nigh!

Until you do, you can be pretty sure that it isn’t.

Consistency

One of the characteristics of poor time managers (and I’m speaking from bitter experience) is a lack of consistency. We start things off and don’t finish them. We bring in new working practices which make a great deal of difference for a short while and then we drift back to the old ways. We are creatures of a thousand and one brilliant ideas and nothing to show for them.

This is very bad news - not just because we don’t produce the goods at the end of the day, but also because all the effort we put in to stopping and starting is wasted. People who produce great results often work extremely hard, but it’s not unknown for poor time managers to be working even harder - but without producing the good results.

In fact one could make an argument about time management being about nothing else other than consistency. It’s consistency that delivers the goods.

One of my favourite sayings at the moment is:

What you haven’t done is the price you paid for what you have done.

Life ends at 45?

Life ends at 45… Study reveals when our mental powers start to diminish

Huge survey carried out on Whitehall civil servants shows our brains peak earlier than we think

So cry the headlines in The Independent.

But as Disraeli famously said: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

Does this study really prove something completely different: that ten years working as a civil servant in Whitehall is a very effective way of reducing whatever mental powers you had to start off with?

(I speak as someone who worked in Whitehall for only two years and has never been the same since!)

Key Principles of the New System III: Getting Stuff Done

As you may have guessed from the silence since I last posted I’ve run into some problems with the “perfect version”. 

Basically there have been two problems which I’ve been endeavouring to overcome

The first is that there is always a tendency for important or difficult tasks to get shunted to one side. The new system needs to avoid this and, while keeping a modicum of flexibility, strictly enforce selection neutrality. However hard one tries to design a system which is procrastination-proof, procrastination always seems to find a way in.

This brings up the second problem which I have been struggling with. This has been to find the best possible way of getting stuff done once it has been started. It is very difficult to stop this being a slow process - whether or not the tasks are split down into smaller chunks. It’s very inefficient to start stuff and then not finish it. Apart from anything else, it wastes the time we spend on it before tailing off. But most important, we are crying out for results and not getting results impacts our lives and work.

As I’ve said before, projects are like houseplants. They need regular watering or they dry up and eventually die. So what I’ve been concentrating on is to make sure that the new system ensures that everything is finished once it’s started - quickly.

So what it all boils down to is: 

1. Get stuff started
   and
2. Get it finished

Interview with Mark Forster

There’s an interview with me just published on the Great Printable Calendars website.

Evernote Clearly

A great new tool has just been published by Evernote for use (at present) with the Google Chrome browser only. You do not need an Evernote account to use it. 

What it does is to remove all the clutter from articles on the internet and present them in a reader-friendly format. 

For instance here are the instructions for SuperFocus in Clearly format, followed by the normal view. Click on the images to see full size:

Get Evernote Clearly from the Chrome Store (Make sure you are using Google Chrome when you do so)