Major Problems With Effective Time Management
Prioritizing by level of importance is a major problem for many people trying to achieve success with how to prioritize. Visit time management systems.
Time management trainers still pull the wool over your eyes with the old-fashioned technique of prioritizing by importance. Another problem area is scheduling activities to time. And a third problem is using weekly to-do lists.
Prioritizing by importance has been a common sense time management technique taught for years. So telling you that it is a bad technique might raise some red flags. That’s ok. I know I’m right. And you will discover your own solution for time management by understanding this article.
Naturally, the ‘time flies’ phenomenon is great if you’re in ‘the zone’ of productivity and life satisfaction. But how do you juggle all the deadlines, resources, and other people to find the balance?
And you have the problem of combining your social life with your career development, because we all know that modern lifestyles are crossing the border between your professional time management, and your social life.
Weekends are a great time to catch up o life’s basic necessities. Because the week is so hectic. But imagine a handful of chores including cooking, filing in some documents, getting the pet to the vet, mowing the grass. The chores easily stack up. How can you really prioritize it all?
Have you tried prioritizing a list of things to do when you have dozens of things to do? It gets messy doesn’t it? You try to arrange the order to decide on the most important thing. And you go and do that first. The thing is that areas of life get neglected because there isn’t enough time to do everything when you prioritize by importance. Some things are always low on the list.
If you organized everything by level of importance you will end up rushing around putting out fires because you neglected things until they were practically emergencies, such as cutting the grass (forest!) or exercising, or organizing the files on your computer.
You could try combining importance with urgency. On Saturday afternoon you want to take your daughter to her tutor, get your hair cut, read through the office paperwork you’ve brought home with you because there wasn’t enough time at work last week. Now, you realize it will be hard to fit all those things in. So you decide to not get your hair cut again this weekend. Until your wife nags at you for having long scruffy hair it’s not urgent is it.
Prioritizing by urgency, what would you do? Take your daughter. Get your hair cut. Read the office paper work. More and more of life gets neglected and messy.
Taking your daughter to her lesson is not as important as reading the office information. So the office work is more important (you’ll be fired if you don’t keep up). But the lesson for your daughter is in an hour, so that’s urgent. You could try doing them both at the same time couldn’t you?
Now that your wife has made fun of your long hair it gets adjusted from priority C to priority A. The office memo can be done Sunday evening so that’s actually priority B. But taking the wife shopping is a priority A as she’s nagging that you didn’t have time to go food shopping last week and she can’t carry it all her self.
Along comes Saturday afternoon, and Sally’s tutorship now gets crossed off the B list and put on the A list because it’s Saturday, and you’ve got Memo and Sally’s Tutorship on the A list.
The ABCDE method of prioritizing by importance creates a lot of difficulty. Even with just those handful of tasks to account for. When life is far more varied and complex. And you know the mess experienced with time management when everything is put into the mix. Trying to prioritize by importance and urgency is, as I hope you’ll agree, next to impossible, and highly impractical.
Modern time management needs something far better than the old fashioned method of prioritizing. Such a limiting time management technique creates big problems. Find solutions: time management systems.
When you free yourself of the higher authority of traditional time management you will have a chance to develop your natural time management skill. Hopefully this article has made you skeptical of following normal time management so that you search and find something genuinely better for modern life. See time management.
