Where Will You Start Today? (Hint: Prioritize)

We all know people that seem to need total retraining when they return to work after taking only a few hours off for a nap before breakfast. For most of the rest of us, the first day of work after returning from a vacation or holiday may feel like that. It usually means rekindling a purposeful focus while also doing the socially correct thing of talking to colleagues about the time spent apart. Human niceties are an essential part of a work culture of cooperation and collaboration, but watch how most people will do more talking than listening to others (Dale Carnegie is turning over in his grave… ego wins out over talking about the other person’s interests). The first thing on the “official” work agenda is to check email and begin the crap filtering at the same place as before the downtime. Sound familiar? Wandering aimlessly for a few hours is human nature but also a time waster.

Looking up at the bookshelf in my office I see Stephen Covey’s book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and become motivated. This is one of those books where the title suggests a course of action even if you never read the contents… and about a gazillion people have read the contents. With regard to time management as it relates to effectiveness, Covey suggests dividing a piece of paper into four sections and sorting tasks according to Importance and Urgency. Intuitively, we know that everything that is urgent is not necessarily important at the moment. Obviously, things that fall into the category of Important AND Urgent should be done first even if it means doing the heavy lifting first and settling down to the fun stuff later.

My preferred method of prioritizing is to keep a running log of things to do… my Things To Do List that I can easily find on my desk because it has TTDL scrawled at the top. Trying to prioritize on a list is pretty much a useless task if things are highly changeable during the day. Random thoughts listed as they occur can be jotted down in a personal brainstorming fashion and then assigned a priority based on importance and urgency. The only filtering that needs to be done up front is to eliminate those tasks that are both unimportant and not urgent from view. They will happen anyway, so why write them down? Execution of the list boils down to the discipline of focus and managing interruptions.

A good habit for maintaining continuity of thought in work is to end each day with preparing the TTDL for the next day and starting each day by reviewing the list. Today I will be starting from scratch because I failed to take my own advice before vacation. Oh well…

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