So many of you will be familiar with the urgent/important grid and for the last few weeks I’ve been living in box one, the urgent and important mode. There are a few things wrong with this, the first being it’s more stressful than the others. I’m getting to deadlines and under pressure to get a lot done in frankly not enough hours. Then you find that your crisis time is eating into quality time and the important things. So it’s been a while since I used this grid but it was very useful. I wrote out all the things I had to do and then started to be brutal and plan. It’s useful because things like planning and booking things for our holiday in October we taking up time but I dropped them to box 4.
One of the things I did do which although is in the non-urgent, non-important box was clear out my emails. Yes it’s a bit of time wasting but I wanted to get to a point that as we go into the second half of the year I’m a bit more organised. I didn’t just clear it, I flagged things I wanted to put in box 2 and unsubscribed from loads of lists so that i’s saving me time in the future.
- Get Help
So depending on what you do you might be able to get some help. Maybe a college or even a friend or partner might be able to ease the pressure elsewhere to get you on track. Or could you get some paid help, a virtual assistant, a junior member of staff, a cleaner at home, a baby sitter. You need to free up some of your time to get these things out of the way but the important thing is this needs to be a ‘fix’ to get you out of box one and into box two so make sure you have a clear plan and goal. - Move what you can
It might be worth taking a bit of time to try and renegotiate deadlines. Is there something that you can delay and it won’t have too much of an impact. For me this was my festival volunteering. I’ve had to just shelve it this week and delay the deadlines I had until next week. It’s not ideal but it hasn’t had a major impact on anything else and it’s just given me some time to take a breath. - Take Time off
I have lots of balls juggling and I am going from one thing to the other. Wednesday evening was so lovely I invited friends round, had some wine and let the kids fall asleep on a rug in the garden and it felt wonderful to get off the treadmill of life, even if it was just for one night. The kids didn’t care, nothing bad happened except a hang over and apart from having to clean up the next morning I was actually more productive the next day. - Be Radical – Don’t do it
I had a deadline for a proposal on Friday and it was putting me under a lot of pressure. I don’t know if it was the good weather, the mood I was in or what but I decided I wasn’t going to do it. I’ve missed the boat as I won’t get a chance to pitch for at least another year but I needed to grab some time back and this was one thing I was going to struggle to get in on time anyway. So I just accepted that I’d bow out even though I’d done about 60% of the work already. - Learn to Say no
People will naturally make demands on your time and this puts you into box 3 – interruptions. It’s important to learn to say no to people or at least put them off until it’s less busy. The thing I learnt about this a long time ago is get into good practice. If you say you’ll come back to them tomorrow make time for it and people who work with you will soon learn that tomorrow does actually mean tomorrow and you haven’t just delegated it to the long finger. - Be realistic about box 4
It’s a form of procrastination but the phone is a massive distraction. I looked at the screen time report on the Iphone and it was a bit of an eye opener. I have to be on the phone for work, social media, replying to customers, email orders, I can’t get away from it but I realised I was wasting a lot of time. So I restricted the time on games to one hour per day. I used to play them when I was sitting with the kids watching cartoons but now I do my social media posts or try and reply to friends and have reduced my screen time by loads. I have selected the main apps to send me notifications and reduced it from 36 per hour to 3 – these are customers. It’s still nearly 4 hours a day but the balance of Productivity use is on the up!!
So those are a few tips for getting into box 2 – and why do we want to be in there? Because that’s where the best things are, things like planning, goals, quality time with people, relationships, developing yourself and if we don’t operate in box two we are in crisis mode or wasting time on non-important stuff and who would want to be doing that!