Working Smarter : Time Management

The Urgent Should Displace the Important

Aaron Stannard — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 18:13:00 GMT

Layoffs and job losses in recent times have resulted in a significant – some might say punishing – increase in the workload facing many working people. Millions of people have lost their jobs but their work didn’t leave with them. People still on the payroll find themselves picking up that burden. Some people have an almost bewildering array of tasks, assignments, projects and other challenges facing them. The order in which to tackle them is a key decision. And so we ask ourselves: Do I succumb to time pressures and let the urgent rule the day or do I take that so-called "proactive" stance and tend to the important things first?

You’ve no doubt heard it said that the important gives way to the urgent, that the urgent crowds out the important, or other words to that effect. Such comments often precede an admonishment to retain your focus on the important and to not succumb to the pressures of the urgent. Well, for what it’s worth, I think that is probably well-intentioned advice but I also think it’s wide of the mark. The urgent should take priority over the important. In this post, I’ll demonstrate why.

Most discussions about urgent versus important seem to assume that urgent and important are two completely different things and thus there are trade-offs to be made between them. This is not the case. Urgency and importance are inseparable; they are two dimensions of the tasks facing you. Every task, assignment, project or challenge you face has an element of urgency and an element of importance. Consider the grid below:

The grid has two axes: urgency and importance. Both range from low to high thus yielding the four quadrants in the grid:

I - Low importance, low urgency
II - Low importance, high urgency
III - High importance, low urgency
IV - High importance, high urgency

One important question we have to ask ourselves in relation to the mix of work facing us is this: "When should I tend to this?"

There is, then, a scheduling, sequencing or timing problem. Time, of course, is a continuum and, in general terms, we can choose to do things now, soon, later or we can simply defer them to some unspecified point in the future (see the timeline below).

The grid presented earlier not only accommodates this view of time, it also suggests the general slotting of the tasks illustrated on the timeline above (see the items below):

If it's low importance and low urgency, defer it; don’t waste time on it. Here’s your chance to procrastinate and feel good about it.
If it's low importance and high urgency, schedule it for sometime soon; after all, it is urgent but it's not particularly important so you do have to get to it soon but not right away.
If it's high importance and low urgency, schedule it for sometime later; true, it is important but it is not so urgent that you don’t have some leeway in terms of when to schedule it.
If it’s high urgency and high importance, do it now! There’s no excuse to delay.

As you can see from the illustrations above, the urgent does indeed displace the important – but only in terms of scheduling – and in that context the displacement is appropriate.

If you were to prioritize on the basis of importance only, the order of the middle two items on the timeline above would be reversed; a highly urgent item would move from "Soon" to "Later" displaced by a highly important item that could in fact be scheduled for later. The result of this misplaced emphasis on importance only is that fires which should be put out will continue to burn and they might spread. In other words, the consequence of not tending to highly urgent issues that are relatively unimportant is that you wind up increasing their urgency and their importance.

Suppose the staff in a software development shop is working on a new version of its flagship software and it is also charged with fixing bugs with the existing version. Developing the new version is viewed as extremely important. Fixing the bugs in the current version is seen as much less important. However, the new release isn’t scheduled to be released for several months and the bugs need to be fixed in a prompt fashion. If they’re not, customer dissatisfaction levels might rise, perhaps jeopardizing the success of the new version.

So, the next time someone asks you if you’re letting the urgent displace the important, nod, smile and say, "That is as it should be."

About the Author: My name is Fred Nickols. I am a writer, an independent consultant and a former executive. Visual aids of one kind or another have played a central role in my work for many years. My goals in writing for SmartDraw’s Working Smarter blog are to: (1) provide you with some first-rate content you can’t get anywhere else, (2) illustrate how important good visuals can be in communicating such content and (3) illustrate also the critical role visuals can play in solving the kinds of problems we encounter in the workplace. I encourage you to comment on my posts and to contact me directly if you want to pursue a more in-depth discussion.

Ideas Make Money. So Make Time for Ideas.

Rich — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 14:49:00 GMT

We all know that as a manager you are strapped with a finite amount of time to perform so many activities in a day, week, or month. In this unstable economy most managers are doubling their efforts due to a shrinking team and limited resources. As costly as it may seem, you as the manager need to make time to brainstorm with your team and innovate your products, services, offers, processes and everything else. Otherwise, the value of your product or service stagnates and inherently loses value in the eyes of your customers.

Here are some ways to make brainstorming productive and manageable for you and your team:

Consider all ideas, initially – In order to get to the good ideas you must sift and sort through a multitude of bad ideas in order to uncover a nugget of innovative gold. Most of the time that nugget of gold was not considered to be anything more than a pebble within the sifter when first discussed. Over time the idea was polished into something of value. If you and your team didn’t take the time to go through this process, then perhaps the idea would never be realized.

Allocate time for brainstorming – There is a time investment for nearly everything you do, so why is brainstorming treated differently? If you are concerned about spending too much time brainstorming then there are two simple ways to reduce the amount of time you and your team spend brainstorming. First, have your team do some homework in advance by coming up with some ideas to discuss ahead of time, instead of waiting until the meeting to brainstorm. This will allow the discussion to eliminate some ideas off the bat, and others to be focused for refinement.

Second, give your team members the tools to properly brainstorm. If you read the Working Smarter post back in February entitled, “Why Communicate Visually,” then you will remember that people think and communicate in various ways. Take this into consideration and provide the tools necessary that allows all of your team members to properly capture their ideas. Give them a tool that allows them to capture their ideas visually, such as mind maps. Below is a mind map that I created while I was brainstorming ideas for posts for this blog.

Click here for a full-sized version of this image.

Evaluate everything, even what isn’t broken – Boy, think of all the wonderful things that would have never been discovered or improved if everyone thought “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it!” Just because something is working, doesn’t mean that it’s perfect. Managers need to challenge themselves, and challenge their teams to constantly evaluate everything all of the time to discover areas for potential improvement.

Give yourself and your team the ability, time, and tools to innovate by brainstorming. It is as critical as ever when you are strapped for time, not the other way around.

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Three Ways to Empower Your Employees

Rich — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 00:00:00 GMT

How many times have you handed a project off to your team, only to have many of the tasks delegated back to you?

You know how it goes – you hold a meeting to introduce the project, you delegate responsibilities to the team, and before you know it your team bombards you with questions about detail-level decisions. So what happens? You end up handling a bulk of the details yourself.

So why do your team members bog you down with questions? Perhaps some team members need help staying on the right track for the project; maybe they’re unclear about the goals of a few particular tasks; or perhaps they simply don’t feel comfortable making decisions without your explicit approval.

In any case, the point of delegating is to remove the manager away from much of the detail-oriented work and to empower the other team members with a sense ownership over the delegated tasks. All of this is done to allow the manager to handle the big picture items of the overall project without constantly worrying about the details.

But sadly, that’s often not the case. More often than not you find much of the detail-oriented work kicked back up to you, the manager. So, who’s to blame when tasks are delegated back up? As the manager – you are to blame.

If you follow these three simple tips you can avoid these delegation gaffes by ultimately empowering your team to make their own decisions without constantly needing validation from you.

Provide as much information as possible from the start – As a manager you know that questions will always come up and you also know that many questions typically mean work stoppages until they’re answered, thus there is always a burden on you to answer all questions as fast as possible to keep the project moving. One thing you can do to cut down on the number of questions is to simply provide more details as well as the generalities from the start. Have your team understand the importance of their roles and processes and how they fit in relation to your ongoing projects. Give them the means to answer their own questions!

Brainstorm together and encourage innovation – The old adage that “there’s more than one way to skin a cat” is absolutely true in projects that encompass teams of people, so encourage your team to brainstorm together on the best possible ideas and solutions. If your team finds a great solution that works for a particular problem, then document it as part of a standard process for your team that can be followed the next time the task needs to be carried out. By doing it in this way you now have a standardized procedure that can serve as a guideline for future projects. The best part of this process is owned by your team members and that helps them feel more empowered and increases their emotional investment in the project, and they may even feel like more of a stakeholder (not to be confused with shareholder) in the company.

Establish boundaries - A common pitfall managers make is to micromanage competent employees. The whole point is to have your employees contribute in order to get more done for the department, and for the company, so don’t waste your time by overseeing all of the details when your team has proven to be independent. As the manager, be sure to clearly establish appropriate boundaries from the beginning which will keep everyone on task; including you.

To illustrate this, below is a process development diagram for a new marketing campaign with a manager who micromanages his team and the project details. All of the tasks colored in the dark blue are performed by the manager:

Click here to see a larger image of this visual.

Now, if the manager begins to practice the tips above, the process is cut down by a few steps, and the manager relinquishes some of the detailed tasks to his team therefore freeing him up for his other responsibilities outside of this one project:

Click here to see a larger image of this visual.

You will find that a more empowered team is more productive, functions more cohesively, and finishes what they have started – as opposed to you finishing what they have started.

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Three Techniques for Keeping Meetings Brief

Aaron Stannard — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 22:33:00 GMT

When I was in college I had to endure painfully long meetings for all of my student organizations; every presenter at every meeting had some sort of self-important need to prattle on and on about every irrelevant piece of minutia. This resulted in endless, agonizing, uninteresting meetings.

From that point onward I always looked at meetings as inescapable personal productivity sinkholes. However, once I got into the driver's seat and ran a couple of meetings I figured out a few ways to keep meetings short and to the point. Here are a few of the techniques that I'm familiar with:

1. Time Boxing

Time boxing, when it comes to meetings, is a pretty literal concept: use other events to box your meeting into a fixed, inflexible window.

But flexibility is good, right? Not when it means having a 30 minute staff meeting run for an hour past its deadline because two of your managers are long-winded.

The idea behind time boxing isn't to limit the number of discussed items; it's to coerce the meeting's attendees to get to the point quickly.

Here's an example of time boxing for meetings:

All of these meetings use the same conference room; neither the staff meeting nor the sales meeting are going to be able to run long, given that the people in subsequent meetings are going to be pounding on the door trying to get in. The first meetings are boxed in by the subsequent meetings, thus they can’t really spill over into someone else’s meeting.

This is my favorite technique simply because there is no “bad guy” when you have to cut someone off from speaking any further; you’re simply the peace keeper between your own meeting and the next one.

2. Moderation

Well-run organizations self-moderate, where the attendees and presenters help each other stay on track and keep things short without any nudging from the meeting organizer. If someone is running too long then the attendees simply say “we need to move on” or something along those lines; moderation, if anything, is an implementation of brevity-seeking mentality.

Other organizations have the meeting organizer handle all of the moderation himself. Moderation is often employed in tandem with general time limits for meetings.

3. Discussion Limits

Larger organizations limit discussion time for large meetings, Congress being an example. Discussion limits can work in one of two ways:

Before the meeting is held the agenda is distributed to all attendees and any attendee who wishes to speak during a certain agenda item must say so beforehand and will be allotted some time to speak accordingly. Each action item has a fixed amount of total discussion time and that time is divided among the speakers.
There is no planning beforehand, but each agenda item has a fixed amount of discussion time; the discussion will continue until time runs out and a decision is rendered.

Discussion limits might be overkill for smaller organizations, but they are essential for really large meetings.

Once your meeting runs beyond a certain time threshold then each additional minute becomes less productive than the last; keeping your meeting framed under real-world time constraints is essential to ensuring productive meetings.

I hope you’ve found this helpful and feel free to leave some comments below.