Volume2, Issue 7 - July 2001

If I gave you two more hours every day - what would you do with it? This is the question I start off my Time Management Seminars with. I'm sure you can guess the most common answer is "Sleep" (this is after all usually about 9:00am!). Honestly - what would you do?

Have you ever said, if I had more time I would exercise more? Spend more time with my family? Take more educational courses? And, on and on… I'm pretty confident that if I gave everyone more time, they would just find something else to put into that time, right? Would we take that time and just complete what we have on our plate now? Nope - we would just do more. So the problem with time is not necessarily not having enough time - the problem is that we put too much into the time we do have.

We all have just 24 hours in one day. The difference between those people who are successful with their days is how they manage those 24 hours. The rest of us (and there are some days when this is definitely me!) try to do too much, or we are not focused on what we do need to do!

I'm sure that we've all heard the expression "There simply isn't enough time to do everything?" Do you believe that is true? I do. There isn't enough time to do everything - because there is always something else we could be doing! But… there is enough to do the really important things - if we are organized and focused!

Have you read the book "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" by Dr. Stephen R. Covey yet? You should. It is the most successful business book of all time! (FYI - The previous book was Dale Carnegie's, "How to Win Friends and Influence People" - also a good read).

One of the Seven Habits is "First Things First" - and it is all about Time and Priority Management. It is such a big habit, that is has also become it's own book and program.

This habit divides our work into four quadrants. The axis for the quadrants are: Urgent / Not Urgent and Important / Not Important. When I teach this, I explain that Not Urgent and Not Important do not mean that we can stop doing this task! In comparison to the Urgent and Important it should read "Not As Urgent" and "Not as Important".

The first quadrant is Urgent and Important. I call this the "Red" quadrant. This is all of our fire alarms and crisis work. Everyone has a different amount of work here. For instance, if you work in a hospital emergency room - the bulk of your job is in this first quadrant. You do not know what emergencies are going to happen, and cannot plan your day around your workload when you don't know what that is.

We all have time in the first quadrant. Many times the time we spend in the Red quadrant is not our error. The poor time management of other people have put you here. We cannot change that (not in this column anyway). What we can change is the amount of time we spend in the Red quadrant due to our OWN poor time management techniques. Ask yourself the question - "Am I working in this crisis mode when I could have avoided it?" Procrastination, lack of organization, poor choices and focus tell us to work on something else. Before we know it - there is no tomorrow for this project!

The second quadrant is Important but Not Urgent. I call this the "Yellow" quadrant (kind of amber on a traffic signal is the colour I use). This is the caution quadrant. According to Dr. Covey, the main reason that many of us do not manage our time well is due to this quadrant. The "Yellow" quadrant is all about being Pro-Active (doing things before they need to be done), staying organized and clear on our focus.

Most of us spend time in this quadrant "if we have the time". It is usually an end of day type of time killer. WRONG! This is the preventative maintenance quadrant - and we need to give it a much higher priority. I'll come back to this in a minute….

The third quadrant is Urgent but Not Important. I call this the "Blue" quadrant. Very easy to get caught up here. An example of things that are Urgent but Not Important are interruptions from other co-workers. They aren't urgent for us, but we get caught up in them easily. E-mail is a perfect example of this quadrant. As soon as we here the little bell that tells us we have a new message, we usually just "pop" over to see who it is. This is a huge time waster. If what you were working on prior to the bell was a quadrant Red or Yellow you are wasting your time.

We get caught up in the urgency of the moment. I'm not saying never check your email, get your messages from the phone or check your in-box. I am saying that we need to prioritize the moment - and do these chores when we are in the Blue quadrant and not in the Red or Yellow one.

The final box is both Not Urgent and Not Important - and I call it the "Grey" box. It is the social part of work. You know, the extra five minutes at break, the internet surfing that isn't work related, the social part of work. Again - I'm not telling you never to do this. I'm asking that you prioritize when you do it! Use your time wisely. If you are socializing while a project is becoming a Red priority - you are not managing your time well.

We all are guilty of spending too much time in the Grey and Blue quadrant - and not enough time in the Yellow quadrant.

I promised to bring you back to the Yellow quadrant - and here is my advice:

Make a plan to spend an additional 15 minutes in Yellow each day. Perhaps it is at the beginning of your day - or even just before lunch is a good time for me. Keep all your projects on track, do things before they are due, and stay organized. Every five minutes you spend in the Yellow quadrant will save you 30 minutes in the Red quadrant (a Brian Tracey statistic). We lose our time each day in the Red quadrant - so lets plan to spend less time there. It is unrealistic to think that we could avoid Red altogether, but realistic to minimize the time we spend there due to our own poor time management habits.

So - save yourself 90 minutes by focusing on the right quadrant at the right time. It will take you a while to get the hang of this, so I suggest you draw yourself a quadrant box and colour code it. Refer to it several times a day and ask "Am I spending the right time in the right box?"

Good luck. If you have any questions, I recommend that you either pick up the "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People", "First Things First", or give me a call or drop me an email. I promise to treat your request as a "Red" priority! After all, you are both Urgent and Important to me!