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 by understanding this article.

Why does time fly? Procrastination (let's be honest here), absent mindedness, deadline pressures, limited resources, overwhelm... not to mention OTHER PEOPLE making demands on 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.

Think of a handful of chores. Get your hair done. Cut the grass. Take the pet to the vet. Fill that outstanding paper work in, create some form of a meal, AND get your daughter off to her pain lesson. Developing your time management skill of prioritizing effectively seems an excellent plan.

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.

You would never get round to the less important things until they are overwhelming. Like the big pile of dishes to wash up when you've run out of plates. Or organizing the files on your computer when you finally accept that you lose more hours per day looking for things than working.

So Let's Try Combining Importance with Urgency. If it's Saturday afternoon, and Sally's appointment with tutor is 4pm, then that's an urgent priority. So you can read your memo after taking Sally. But what about your hair cut? At what point do you consider that 'urgent'? When it's long? Or when it's 'too' long? Or when the wife nags, or the boss frowns?

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.

That office memo is majorly important. But the tuition appointment is urgent because it starts in an hour. So the office memo has Priority Importance level A. But your daughters tuition has importance B but urgency A.

The wife made fun of your hair again today so you'll cross off the hair cut from the C priority list and put it on the A priority list. You can read the memo tomorrow (Friday) with enough time left while the shops are open, and in time to get back to take the Wife out, so you decide the hair cut is urgent, and should move to priority level A.

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.

I think I've dramatized enough the many calculations that must be made for juggling decisions on task to act on in your time management planning. And we only included just a few tasks in our example scenarios. Trying to prioritize by importance mixed with urgency only leads to overwhelm and giving up on using time management systems altogether.

It doesn't work for time management now because modern lifestyles are faster paced and more integrated. That is, you can do more things in the same locations. And the borders of the work place, and working at home have blurred.

When you free yourself of the higher authority of traditional time management techniques you will have a chance to develop your natural time management skill. Hopefully this article has made you skeptical of following normal time management systems so that you search and find something genuinely better for modern life.