How to escape work quagmires
Work time can be divided into four categories, and three of them are time wasters, a time management expert says. Those time wasters are your emergencies, other people’s emergencies, and trivia.
The category of important matters that aren’t emergencies is the one for planners. The others can needlessly drain time, says Debra Lund, a time management speaker and manager of public relations for Franklin Covey Co. of Salt Lake City.
"The best habit is to be proactive and take responsibility for your own actions," she says. "You can’t blame other people for not having enough time."
She defines the four work categories this way:
• Urgent matters, emergencies: These are the crises, deadlines, and fires that have to be handled immediately.
• Important matters that aren’t emergencies: This is the quadrant of planning because it’s here that employees can spend quality time. People who operate in this category are good at planning their weeks ahead of time; they don’t wait until Monday morning when the phone never stops ringing and the first crises arise. If this is where you’d like to be, Lund suggests spending 30 minutes of planning time on a Friday afternoon or Saturday.
"Look to see what deadlines might be coming next week, and think ahead to emergencies and plan for emergencies," she advises.
• Other people’s emergencies: Even good planners can become bogged down in the emergencies created by people who didn’t plan appropriately, Lund says.
"This is the quadrant where people interrupt you; phone calls come in," she says. These tasks might not be important to you, but they’re very important to someone else.
"It’s a scary quadrant because it’s similar to quadrant one, and everybody says that it’s important you do this right now even though it really might not be that important," Lund notes.
An escape from these types of emergencies is to ask yourself: "Why is this important? Is this urgent activity contributing to an important objective?"
• Trivia, busy work, irrelevant telephone calls: "This is the quadrant where we escape," Lund says. Television falls into this category. So do casual conversations and unimportant work tasks.
"Most people hide in quadrants three and four, and then when all heck breaks loose and they have a fire, they’re in quadrant one," Lund observes. "My boss always says, A lack of planning on their part doesn’t constitute an emergency on my part.’ It’s not that you don’t want to serve and help, but other people’s agendas pull you from what you should be doing."
Lund recommends you try to stay in the second category of planning as much as possible because this will prevent emergencies and keep you focused on the important work.
"Ask yourself, If I continue to work on this thing, would it make a significant impact on my job?’" she suggests. "We don’t like to admit it, but we like to procrastinate with things we don’t like to do."
[Editor’s note: The concept of the four quadrants was introduced in First Things First, a book by Stephen R. Covey, A. Roger Merrill, and Rebecca R. Merrill. The book was published in 1995 by Simon & Schuster of New York.
For more information on the book or time management workshops, contact the Franklin Covey Co. at (800) 901-1776 or P.O. Box 31406, Salt Lake City, UT 84131.]
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