Time Management

Urgent and important

The distinction is Eisenhower’s, and his formulation remains the clearest: what is important is seldom urgent, and what is urgent is seldom important.

The matrix that came out of it is still used and is useful for one thing, looking back at how the days went. For deciding, it helps less than people think. Everybody points at the quadrant to defend, important and not urgent, and nobody explains how you establish what goes in it. That decision stays with whoever has to take it, and it’s the difficult part.

Urgency has an unfair advantage: it announces itself. What’s important makes no noise, and so it waits. The practical rule that follows is uncomfortable: important things should be dealt with precisely when there’s no need to, which is the only way of getting ahead of the future instead of chasing it.

Finding the thing that unlocks the others

Among the important objectives there’s almost always one that, once reached, makes all the others easier. Gary Keller’s book made the idea popular under the name The One Thing, and the image is the domino: one piece knocks over a bigger one.

With a team the first job is finding it, and it isn’t a theoretical exercise. You do it with two concrete questions. Which client, once won, changes the company’s position. Which product, if it comes out earlier or better than the competition, shifts the balance. Answering those two reorders the priorities better than any planning technique.

A to-do list isn’t time management

A to-do list is there to remind you what there is to do. It’s useful and it has to be kept distinct from managing your time: it says what the activities are, not which ones count.

You can finish a day having crossed off every line on the list without having moved the thing that mattered by a centimetre. It happens often, and it’s quite satisfying too. In the sessions we work on a different list, which we call the success list: the few things that, done, make the rest lighter. Remote working makes the distinction sharper, because the days stretch, the calls multiply and the conversations that used to sort things out in a corridor have to be scheduled.

What multitasking costs

Holding several things together is a useful capability in life. Applied to a task that demands concentration, you pay for it.

A piece of work interrupted three times doesn’t cost the time the work took. It also costs the time it takes each time to get back to where you were, and that time appears in nobody’s diary, so nobody counts it.

And when the urgent things all pile up at once the tension rises, which is why managing time and managing change and pressure can’t be treated separately.

In a group, time gets divided

In a team, managing time is a matter of dividing the work on the basis of who can do what, and it goes well beyond the sum of the individual diaries.

Each person has abilities that make some activities much faster for them than for somebody else. Spotting them is what the Assessment does, and a split built on that map saves the group more time than any individual technique.

In building the ladder of priorities it’s worth keeping a familiar proportion in mind: a small share of what you do produces most of the result. That’s Pareto’s law, the one people quote as eighty-twenty.