The Urgency to kill Non Urgent tasks

A search on the concept on Time Management can land you with thousands of search results and hundreds of books. There is so much information written about time management. You don;t have to look deep. It's all on the web. I have even attended time management courses to get better at it. And yet I find myself wondering

“Why am I still unable to manage time efficiently? Did I miss something and haven’t I got the concept right? Why can't I find ways to prioritize and manage time efficiently?”


There are numerous methods to efficiently manage time. A quick read can introduce you to techniques such as setting goals, objectives, maintaining schedules, recording and reviewing time logs, urgency, importance, ranking, prioritization, and this list can go on. I can just pick one technique and follow it. Maybe I should spend time reading more about time management so I can get better at it. Why is it difficult to manage time? That's coz I am looking at the symptoms instead of the root cause.


Most time management books and websites talks about Urgency and Importance. Stephen Covey in his book on First Things First clearly outlines what we need to do to get our act together. After reading his book a few times, I figured out that my time management problem is with trying to identify time wasters. I haven't found an easier way to identify those time wasters in Quadrant 4.

It's easy to identify if a task is important or urgent. So it’s easy to fit that into either Quadrant 1, 2 or 3. However, you have so many day-to-day activites that are trivial in nature that go unnoticed because of your personal habits. And without your knowledge they just automatically move from Quadrant 4 to Quadrant 1.

How do I get to a state so I can recognize it and push these time wasters back to the Quadrant 4? Once I figure them out and change my habit to focus more on Quadrant 2, I guess I will be Gold.

For example of a quadrant chart, see link below.


http://www.brefigroup.co.uk/acrobat/quadrnts.pdf

For those who are still new to time management concepts (i doubt there is anyone), I suggest you skim through some of the below links:

http://www.mindtools.com/pages/main/newMN_HTE.htm

http://www.time-management-basics.com/index.shtml

http://www.studygs.net/timman.htm

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~acskills/success/time.html

http://www.teal.org.uk/sv/timemgnt.htm

http://the99percent.com/tips/browse/20/prioritization

http://www.pickthebrain.com/blog/important-vs-urgent-5-ways-to-focus-on-what-really-matters/

http://blog.lifepattern.org/2008/06/22/urgency-vs-importance/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTugjssqOT0

http://www.864coach.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/Quadrant-II.pdf