Prioritise by Dr Ian Gregory
Maximise your output and get home on time!
The idea of prioritising what you have to do, and doing only what is truly important to you is one of the fundamental lessons to be learned from time management. However, quite often I meet people who tell me that even after they have prioritised and eliminated the unimportant, there is still too much to do.
Over the years I’ve noticed a common problem in most businesses – too many projects. Often when you ask a manager which are the important ones, they answer ‘all of them’. The problem is each person has only between 35 and 48 hours a week to do their work in. If you’re working on six or seven different projects on top of a line job, then you probably only spend an average of an hour or two on each of them, which is just enough to do some admin and go to a meeting, though little in terms of actually progressing them. In this way, projects drag on for months and months, little gets progressed, and eventually most of the projects are superseded or abandoned, wasting all of that valuable time.
When I first started my consulting career, my clients would sometimes comment on how much progress we could make in a couple of weeks. What we had was the ability to focus on one task, meaning we got it done far quicker. Focus is the alternative to the traditional juggling metaphor that many managers use. It’s about using the hours of the day to deliver maximum value as quickly as possible.
Instead of having several projects in the air at any given time, pick one or two and focus on them. Encourage your peers and subordinates to focus on the same projects. Focus means that the hours that used to be spent managing all of the different projects can be used to actually progress a project. The project gets completed quicker, the business gets the benefits sooner, you get the credit sooner and you can start on the next project on your list. In turn, that project will also be completed quickly. You’re still working the same number of hours (or maybe fewer), yet you’re making them count and raising your personal productivity and that of your team.
Look at how you spend the hours in your week. If you shelved a few projects for a few months, will you actually get them all completed sooner by doing them one or two at a time? Experiment, you might get home on time!
Dr Ian Gregory specialises in Knowledge Worker Performance issues. You can read more of his thinking at www.knowledgeworkerperformance.com
Copyright 2002-04 ©Dr Ian Gregory used with his expressed written permission
