Everything you know about time management is a lie, and how to manage your time.
Time management is a misleading term.
Time can’t be managed. It keeps ticking on.
However, the one thing we can manage is ourselves. That means effective time management is self-management.
There are 4 quadrants every task you work on falls into.
- The urgent but not important.
- The urgent and important.
- The not important and not urgent.
- The not urgent and important.
First Quadrant
The first quadrant is crisis management. If you spend your time on urgent and important tasks, you will spend time putting out one fire after another. It won’t be long before you break down.
Second Quadrant
The second quadrant is distractions like phone calls and meetings. If you spend your time on urgent and not important tasks, you will feel a sense of accomplishment ticking off your to-do list, but at the end of the day, you won’t have achieved anything worthwhile.
Third Quadrant
The third quadrant is time wasters, pleasurable to your brain but dangerous to your future self. If you spend your time on the not urgent and not important tasks, you are basically wasting your time, or in this case, your life.
Fourth Quadrant
The fourth quadrant is planning ahead. If you spend your time in the not urgent and important tasks, you will prevent running like a headless chicken working on urgent and important tasks because you will have prevented the important tasks from becoming urgent.
So the highest use of your time is to work on the not urgent but important tasks.
But this is also the hardest to do because we tend to only consider what is directly in front of us, which includes urgent but not important and urgent and important tasks.
But the solution to this is to plan ahead. Important tasks that are not urgent rarely announce themselves. By the nature of not being urgent, you will have to create time to think out these tasks.
Once important tasks move from not urgent to urgent, it is already too late. You are in crisis management, putting out fires you could have handled when it wasn’t urgent yet. this diminishes your effectiveness and causes burnout.
But once you figure out your quadrant 4 tasks, the next thing is to schedule them into your day. At this junction, you face another problem as you will not get any dopamine working on them as you will when you work on an urgent task.
The trick of working on these tasks is to ensure to tackle them earlier in the day. At this period, your willpower and physical energy are at their highest, and you can almost force yourself to focus for 1–2 hours. After that, you can go ahead to work on the other quadrants.
You need to think of your time as a bucket and these tasks as different sizes of stones.
The important and not urgent are large stones. The important and urgent are medium stones. The not important but urgent are small stones, while the not important, and not urgent are sand.
Every day, every morning, you have an empty bucket.
If you start filling it with sand, because it is easier to do, then before you know it, there won’t be any more space to put the larger stones, even if you wanted to.
But if you start filling it with large stones first. The hard but necessary tasks. You will find that at the end of the day, you may still have space for everything, including a little sand.
Conclusion
Time is the common denominator. Everyone gets the same amount -24 hours. How we manage ourselves within 24 hours is what makes all the difference. Spending your time in the quadrant 4 task starts off with determination and hard work, but over time, it is easier until, you have more control over yourself and that puts you in the rare position of having control over your time, which is true wealth.
