How often do you spend your entire day “putting out fires” and handling emergencies, and then end up feeling like you accomplished nothing worthwhile? It happens to the best of us. You have looming deadlines, reports to file, people interrupting with problems that have to be taken care of right away ?#147; who has any time left over to do real work?
Today I’m going to share an important time-leveraging strategy to help you assess the true value of all those little “emergencies” you spend your time handling. Using this technique will help you keep things in perspective and prevent you from always operating in a reactionary mode.
To begin with, if you want to effectively manage your time, you have to set goals. To reach your goals, it follows that you have to work toward them. There are activities that will help you reach those goals, and there are other tasks that basically only serve to distract you from pursuing your goals.
This is one of the secrets to using your time well. Every time you are confronted with a task that seems urgent, stop and ask yourself this question:
“Does this activity help me reach my goals?”
That’s it! Honestly answering this simple question is how you distinguish between activities that seem urgent and those that are actually important.
In a nutshell:
Assess how much these urgent activities contribute to reaching your goals. If they do help you move toward your goals, then they become important. Make them a high priority. Urgent activities, on the other hand, may still need to be done - but they may not need to be done first.
Urgency can be extremely dangerous. Realize that urgency is the enemy of your priorities. Focusing on urgency will cause you to consistently ignore your long-range projects ?#147; those that require training, momentum, confidence, and experience. If you focus on urgency, you'll emphasize rapid-fire details and petty deadlines over slower, more meaningful achievements.
“Putting out fires” is not a good way to advance your goals or your career. When someone presents a task that appears urgent, first ask yourself the question of whether it helps you reach your goals, and then plan your priorities accordingly. When you drop everything to handle the emergency that just crossed your desk, you lose your flow. Your plans go out the window, your productivity stalls, and your stress level mounts. Why go through all that for something that, in the end, doesn’t really matter to you?
Remember: a failure to plan on someone else’s part does not constitute an emergency on your part. If someone brings you something at the last minute that is not related to your goals and wants you to drop everything to take care of it, step back and take a moment to assess whether it is actually your problem - or theirs!
Using this technique to assess the relative urgency or importance of new tasks will help you keep things in perspective and prevent you from always operating in a reactionary mode. Instead of spending your day responding to emergencies, you can proactively work towards your goals. You will spend your time more efficiently and end the day with a sense of accomplishment.
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