7Breaths

Nice post from David Allen over at the Huffington Post. Great quote "A crisis should be a crisis. Urgent things should be urgent. And they should be exceptional"

Seems to feed in to Covey’s ideas on Quadrant II tasks - Important, Not Urgent - work on these and the Important and Urgent tasks should arise a lot less frequently. Good explanation of it here. So how do you know what to be working on? I like the way Nicholas Bate ( If you've not come across him already I'd advise setting aside a good block of time to read his blog - a real 'thought leader' for me) describes these tasks:

• Important
• Investing
• Interesting

Identify the tasks that fit these criteria and spend more time in Quadrant II working on things that will have the long term payoffs.

What is not measured is not mastered.

How are you spending your time? If you want to be productive a great first step is to master your time management. There are 168 hours in the week - do you know how you've spent them over the last week?

You need to know what you are doing before trying to change anything.

The Exercise:

A useful quick exercise to see how aware you are of how you are spending your time is to:

Recall
Grab your diary and a sheet of paper.

List the hours 0 - 23 for each day of the week

For each hour write down what you were doing - use your diary to remind you. Try and be as accurate as you can, if you are not certain leave it blank.

Review


On doing this exercise you may well find that you can account for every hour - well done in that case. However even if each hour is accounted for a lot of people are surprised at how much unproductive time is spent during the week. Just as bad are blocks of time when we can't even recall what we were doing - again this is usually just unproductive time as you can usually remember if you were engaged in something worthwhile.

How did you do, I'd love to hear some feedback.

It's surprising how unaware we often are of the time we are spending. To try and get some focus on how our time is going I suggest the following challenge:


The Challenge:

Over the next week record what you are doing. Use anything to capture the data, for me I use a sheet of paper which goes everywhere with me. Each time you start a new activity record it. Try and be as detailed as you can, so instead of 2 hours on the computer break it down into its components - reading email, RSS, working on spreadsheet for account xxx etc.. Same with all activities.

Keep the record going for a week, you should have some useful data to work on for next Saturdays exercise...