Time Management - A Paradigm Shift
Despite all your best efforts with To Do Lists, Action Plans, prioritisation, calendars, state-of-the-art diaries and up-to-the minute timetables, do you find yourself saying that there are “never enough hours in the day”?
The two primary factors that drive our choices concerning how we spend our time are urgency and importance.
It is a status symbol in our society to be busy. If we are busy, we are important. We can even get our security from it; it is validating, popular and pleasing and it is also a distraction from looking at what is really important. Many of the traditional time management tools focus us on doing the urgent things. However, the more time and energy we spend doing the urgent, the less we have available for doing the important. Many of the things that are important to us achieving our objectives are not urgent, and therefore are left by the wayside. Take a look at this table below:
| Urgent | Non Urgent | |
| Important |
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| Non Important |
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The next table displays the average amount of time spent in each quadrant. The first estimated figure is what we should all be aimin gfor, however the second figure (in red) shows us how much time we really normally spend there:
| Urgent | Non Urgent | |
| Important |
20-25% 25-30% |
65-80% 15% |
| Non Important |
15% 50-60% |
Less than 1% 2-3% |
As we can see, many of the things that are important to us achieving our objectives are not urgent. Ask yourself, where did you spend most time last week? Are you focusing on the Urgent areas at the expense of Non Urgent, but Important, areas of your life? What could you do to make a positive step towards better managing your time today?
