Stop Prioritizing To Achieve Time Management Success

Prioritizing by level of importance is a major problem for many people trying to achieve success with time management.

One of the biggest time management goofs of all time is to prioritize by importance or urgency. Another disaster area of time management training is to schedule your activities to time. And the third major mistake people try to manage time with is the traditional weekly to-do list.

In this article I will explain the problem of prioritizing by importance. Having just gone against the grain of traditional time management, you will have a glimmer of hope, and a dashing of skepticism. Hope because you know normal time management systems are a pain. And Skepticism because what I'm going to show you is not common.

Time flies so fast doesn't it? Deadlines. Scarce resources. Overwhelming chores. And other people who take up way too much of your precious time.

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.

How can you get your hair cut, mow the lawn, take the dog to the vet, fill in those blasted document forms, make dinner, AND drop Sally off at her tutor?! Weekends seem to be used more and more just for catching up on life's basic necessities. Clearly, developing your time management skill is more than just a good idea.

So let's begin with a question: Have you prioritized a list of things to do by level of importance recently? It works doesn't it. In a messy kind of way. Not quite 'plain sailing' though... It's ok if you don't have much to do, but then you wouldn't be bothered about a time management system in the first place if you didn't have quite a few things to juggle. So you've probably noticed, just writing down a list and prioritizing by importance or urgency doesn't work as well as you'd like. Do you have to neglect certain areas of life because other things are 'more important'? Should you list priorities by 1 to 10 and just focus on number 1 until it's done and then move on to number 2?

You would never get round to things like cutting the grass, exercising regularly, filing papers, reading your kids night time stories.

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 3m, and the tutorship and office memo are all also on the A list.

That scenario does work, but it's not exactly smooth sailing is it? The ABCDE Method of prioritization is difficult to imagine working even with only 3 tasks... But what when you try to mix in the rest of your responsibilities and life? ...And there are changes in what's urgent all too often... so trying to prioritize like that soon gets you in a jam.

Prioritizing by importance or urgency doesn't work because modern life is way too busy for such a shallow method often what is screamingly urgent is not important compared to other things. Trying to prioritize by importance or urgency creates big problems. It used to work, but not today.

You need to find an alternative to the normal same old same old time management techniques that they're trying to force feed you with today. Your time is the most precious commodity you have got. Mind how you use it and which time management systems you live by.

Article Source: http://www.myaddirectory.com

Further examples of effective time management are available from Nathan T Shaw including ideas for business time management and team building training.

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