Mark Forster's Blog

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01/21/12--05:15: New Menu Item: Articles (chan 1846356)

I have added a new menu item for Articles. This accesses the blog category Articles, which shows the contents of the blog with all the minor posts removed, such as administrative messages, news items and passing thoughts or queries.

So by using this tab you can quickly get to the important stuff on the website. Try it and see.




01/22/12--05:51: Exercising the choice muscle (chan 1846356)

In my recent article Taking the Easy Choice I suggested that the ability to make difficult choices was something that could be improved by training.

So I’d like to hear suggestions for exercises that would strengthen our ability to do this.

There’s one in my book Get Everything Done. You nominate one task you are going to do the next day. It can be something you need to do anyway, or it can be something completely arbitrary. Start with something easy. If you succeed in doing it, then you choose something a little bit more difficult for the following day. And so on day by day, getting a little bit harder each time. Whenever you fail to do the day’s task (no excuses are accepted), you have to reduce the difficulty of the task for the next day. The idea is that you build yourself up to the point where you can rely on yourself to do even the most difficult tasks when you say you are going to do them.

Can anyone think up some more exercises which would as effective or even more effective? Answers in the Comments.




01/23/12--11:44: Another mental strength exercise (chan 1846356)

I gave one suggested exercise in my post yesterday about Exercising the Choice Muscle, and there are several more suggestions from readers in the Comments.

Here’s one exercise which I don’t think anyone else has come up with yet, though it’s very simple and straightforward.

Write a list of five random tasks

Do them in the order in which they are written down

Then write another list, adding one more task, i.e. six

Repeat regularly adding one more to the total tasks on the list each time

You may not do any other tasks while doing this exercise. If you fail to complete the  tasks or do them in the wrong order, then next time reduce the number of tasks until you do succeed in doing them.




01/23/12--13:25: SuperFocus instructions now in Korean (chan 1846356)

I have added a Korean translation to the SuperFocus instructions. Many thanks to Seokhwan Kim for translating them.




01/23/12--17:28: Past Articles (chan 1846356)

When I was preparing the Articles tab, I went back and looked through all the past articles in order to make sure they were tagged as Articles. In the process I came across quite a few old articles which I think I think are worth reviving. Some of them I’d even forgotten that I’d written!

Here’s a short selection of the ones I like best:

From Pipe Dream to Project

The Problem with Deadlines

Vague Goals

Friction

Feeling Good




01/24/12--07:34: Reminder: Registration Expiry (chan 1846356)

This is just to remind you that the number of registrations for the Forum is limited to 250 and that number is currently filled.

This means that every time I get a request for a new registration I delete the existing account which has been unused for the longest time. The current longest one has been unused for 1 year 73 days.

So if you haven’t used your account for a while and want to make sure it doesn’t lapse, all you have to do is log-in to the account. You don’t have to make a post.

If the number of requests for accounts rises considerably so that the unused period before deletion gets unacceptably small, I shall have to shell out some extra cash and upgrade my account with Squarespace. Mind you, that would also allow on-site registration so that would be some compensation!




01/25/12--01:22: Reminder: Donations (chan 1846356)

Just a reminder that everything on this site is free with the exception of my books (and one of those is a free download). That gives you access to one of the most powerful time management systems, hundreds of articles, a forum to ask questions and discuss your time management problems or ideas, and frequent new articles and updates.

There are no ads on the site, apart from the books. OK, there may be one or two lurking in dark corners which I haven’t spotted. These are from the days when there were ads on the site. Whenever I come across one I remove it. They produce virtually no income in any case.

The site does cost money to maintain and a vast amount of time too. So if you want to show your appreciation, don’t forget the donation box in the margin. I’m very grateful to those who have donated in the past, but I haven’t had even one donation for months now!

Anything you feel like giving will be greatly appreciated. And to make it easy, you don’t even have to go to the margin - here’s the box!

 



 




01/26/12--09:48: Urgency: the natural way to prioritize? (chan 1846356)

Ever since Charles Hummel wrote his classic 1967 essay The Tyranny of the Urgent, urgency has had a bad press in the time management world. Received time management wisdom has long been that prioritizing should be by importance, with urgency as a side-show at best. We’re all by now familiar with Stephen Covey’s Four Quadrants, which gives Important two of the “good” quadrants while Urgent is only allowed one “good” quadrant and then only because it shares it with Important.

The questions I have are “Does Prioritizing by Urgency deserve its bad reputation?” and its corollary “Is Prioritizing by Importance all that it’s cracked up to be?”

If you construct a To-Do list in which all the tasks relate to your commitments (and every to-do list should be constructed on that basis), then everything on that list ultimately has to be done. You have, in other words, to have the intention to meet the specifications that go with each of your commitments. If you don’t have that intention, it’s not a commitment. And if it’s not a commitment it shouldn’t be on your to-do list.

Having accepted that everything on your to-do list has to be done, then the easiest and most direct way of getting through the list would be a simple First In First Out method. You do the list in the order in which tasks get written on the list. Importance makes no difference to the order, because if everything has to be done everything is equally important.

Of course we all know that this FIFO method wouldn’t work, and the reason it wouldn’t work is because tasks have different degrees of urgency. Urgency is what makes it necessary for us to do one particular task before another regardless of where it’s written on the list.

Urgency is in fact the natural way to prioritize. We do things first because they need to be done first. The farmer sows the seed and later the crop appears. At one time sowing becomes urgent and at another reaping. There is no possible way of saying that sowing is more important than reaping or vice versa.

Why then does prioritizing by urgency have such a bad press? I think there are two reasons:

The first is that people tend to think of the degree of urgency a task has in terms of when the task needs to be finished, when in fact the urgency relates to when the task needs to be started. This misconception is one reason why Prioritizing by Urgency is so often equated with deadline-chasing.

The second is that in the complications of modern life people very rarely do actually prioritize by urgency. They only start to prioritize by urgency when their other methods, or lack of them, have failed. The result is the same as in the first reason: deadline-chasing.




01/27/12--14:49: How Do We Tell How Urgent A Task Is? (chan 1846356)

It’s easy to tell how urgent a task is if we have the boss or a client on our back threatening dire things if it’s not completed by the deadline. But the majority of the tasks we do during the day are not like that. They don’t have precise deadlines and they are generally unsupervised by anyone except ourselves.

How urgent is it to check my email?

How urgent is it to write the next article on my blog?

How urgent is my daily exercise?

How urgent is it to repaint the dining room?

How urgent is it to call my aunt?

How urgent is it to start preparing for Christmas? (my wife has started already!)

How urgent is it to tidy my desk?

How urgent is it to start writing a book if the deadline is six months away?

How urgent is it to write the briefing papers for next month’s meeting?

If you start trying to prioritize by urgency you will find that you are faced with this kind of question over and over again. It’s here that one is tempted to fall back into prioritizing by importance: writing the book is more important than tidying my desk therefore I will write the book in preference to tidying my desk. The problem with that approach is that writing the book is going to continue to be more important than tidying my desk for the next six months, so I may end up with a very untidy desk.

The answer to the question “How do we tell how urgent a task is?” is that in the majority of cases we can’t. Some tasks have obvious negative consequences if we delay them like missing a bus or missing the next issue of the newspaper, but for most there is no “correct” degree of urgency.

The fact is that we have to allocate the urgency ourselves. So how urgent is checking our email? The answer to that will depend on whether we have a policy of checking our email once a day or three times a day or every time a new email arrives. That’s up to us. How urgent is repainting our dining room? That depends on how long we are prepared to put up with the existing decor. Again that’s up to us. How urgent is our daily exercise? That depends on whether we have a set time during the day or not. And - you guessed it - that’s up to us!




01/28/12--01:13: Urgency and Importance (chan 1846356)

In my last two posts I introduced the concept that urgency is superior to importance as a method of prioritizing. I then pointed out that although many tasks are obviously urgent or come with an external deadline, there are a whole raft of tasks which come without a built-in degree of urgency. We have to provide that ourselves.

So how do we decide what urgency to give a task?

By its importance to us of course.

But note that this importance isn’t a direct relationship. We have to give it the degree of urgency that is appropriate to the task. We can’t just say “Task X is more important than Task Y: therefore I’ll do Task X first”. That is where prioritizing by importance falls down. No doubt saving the world is more important than eating breakfast, but it still makes sense to eat breakfast before we set out on our work for saving the world.

You’ll see from the above example that urgency is very sensitive to time. Particularly when we are dealing with minor but necessary tasks there are times of day when they are urgent and times of day when they are not. Eating breakfast is not urgent in the evening, but can be very urgent in the morning.

Let’s have a look at the processes involved in prioritizing by importance and contrast them with prioritizing by urgency:

Prioritizing by importance

Make commitment to a task or project

Decide on its importance

Do it as soon as more important tasks have been done

Prioritizing by urgency

Make commitment to a task or project

Decide on its importance

Allocate urgency appropriate to the type of project/task in accordance with its importance

Do it as soon as more urgent tasks have been done

 

Next article: How do we tell have important a task is?