17 April 2007
Successful Intentions Newsletter
Hi ,
Life is short!
Time is limited. But we keep filling it up with "busyness", time after time. The most critical time you can spend is on what's really significant to your life. The rest is details!
| "Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save". Will Rogers, New York Times |
There are two Dimensions to time:
- Activity: What you do with your time. The reports, meetings, emails, conversations, decisions, investigations, and all that other "stuff" you do at work all day!
- Interest: Your level of real engagement with things you do. Have you noticed when you're highly interested in a particular activity you almost "forget" about time? And when you're not that interested time seems to "drag" or you tend to procrastinate!
There are also three Time Zones:
- Time Maximum : This is all the time you've got - maximum! In a typical day, a week, a month - that's it! If you're working up to this limit then you have no life - you're Maxed out!
- Stress Margin: Within this margin you're really pushing to get things done in time! Start early and finish late and there's just enough time to feed the cat and put out the husband! You can do this for short bursts. But keep it up and you're Stressed out!
- Effectiveness Margin: Here's your best use of time. It might be challenging, but you can meet deadlines, consider decisions, and still have time for the Gym and a romantic dinner! This margin is best represented as Time out!
To be fair there's a lot of work at work that needs to get done, but how do you prioritize it?
Suppose someone observed you at work and somehow "plotted" your activity on a graph according to the urgency of tasks relative to the level of interest you demonstrated for each task. What would that look like over a day, a week, or a month?
You would certainly see clusters of time around particular activities. In fact, it would look more like "blobs" of time, shifting and re-forming depending on the patterns of the day - kind of like one of those retro "Lava Lamps"!
Here are four "blobs" of time that fill up your "Lava Lamp" at work:
- Urgent to Do: This just has to get done, and right now! This is reactive, responding in the moment, fighting fires!
- Important to Do: Fulfilling your assigned role. This is about using your authority, signing off, contributing to decision-making, accepting accountability, being proactive.
- Not Urgent, Not Important: This is the "easy stuff". The things on your "to do" list that you can knock over and give you a feeling of momentum. "See, I'm really getting things done" you say to yourself. But it's all pretty much non-reactive.
- Critical: What really matters is just how much strategic thinking you're doing about the job, and reflecting on how much of what you do is genuinely contributing to your quality and meaning of life.
Of course, you can't spend your entire work day just thinking and reflecting! But I'll bet the way you prioritize your time looks like this: "First I'll attend to the Urgent to Do, then I'll do the Important to Do, and then I'll tidy up the Not Urgent, Not Important, so I can feel justified in spending some time on the Critical things!"
, what percentage of your time can you intentionally (and practically) devote to what really matters?
| "Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana". Groucho Marx |
You can download the "About Time!" Model here.
And find out how to manage time for you and your team more effectively through the One Minute Coach© program here.
Keep your intentions clear,
Peter Webb
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