Art of Progress

In my last blog post, I discussed my take on Stephen Covey’s four generations of time management. In this post, I’ll go more into depth on the first generation of time management: Reaction.

Generally speaking, when it comes to time management you want to reduce time spent reacting. Yet disruptions happen all the time, from the drop-in coworker to the barrage of daily phone calls and emails almost everybody has to deal with. You can minimize the need to react, but you can’t make it go away. It is important not only to minimize disruption, but to deal effectively with it so that new information isn’t missed and emergencies are addressed swiftly.

With that in mind, let’s take a two-pronged approach to reactive time management:

1. Minimizing disruption.
2. Maximizing response effectiveness.

Minimizing Disruption

Disruptions don’t just take away time from the task at hand, they also cause that task to require more time. This happens because people need time to switch from one context to another. Disruptions can come in a number of forms: Coworker drop-ins, phone calls, and emails to name a few. Some disruptions can be controlled, even eliminated, and some of them can’t.

A strategy I’ve found effective is to first divide tasks into four basic categories using the Eisenhower Method. These categories are:

1. Important and urgent. These tasks must be dealt with now. Examples include meetings, addressing emergencies, making repairs, and meeting deadlines.
2. Important but not urgent. These tasks must be dealt with, but not immediately. Examples include planning, prioritization, evaluating new ideas, mission clarification, process improvement, and building relationships.
3. Unimportant and urgent. These tasks require your immediate attention (or at least, they seem to), but aren’t actually that important. Examples include coworker drop-ins, email, text messages, voice-mail, and phone calls.
4. Unimportant and not urgent. These tasks are not really “tasks” they are more like “distractions”. Examples: Messaging friends on Facebook, surfing Reddit, daydreaming.

The trick is to minimize time spent on “unimportant and urgent” and “unimportant and not urgent” tasks and use the time you gain on “important but not urgent” tasks.

As you begin thinking about tasks in this way, one thing you are likely to realize is that you have been treating unimportant, urgent tasks as if they are important and urgent. If you are like most people, this behavior is your biggest source of ineffective time use: Coworkers distract you away from your work, you pause every few minutes to check email, you answer the phone every time it rings, you check your voice-mail immediately upon realizing that a message is waiting. Don’t do that!

Instead, try these simple tactics for dealing with disruptive “unimportant and urgent” tasks:

Manage messages. Email, text messages, voice-mail and other modern forms of communication are often a source of disruption, distraction, and multitasking. Stop checking your messages each time a new one arrives and instead only look when you need a break from the more important thing you’re working on. If new messages are too distracting to ignore then just shut down the distraction:

• Turn off your mobile phone
• Put your office phone on silent
• Close your email program.

Next, schedule some time each day specifically to review and respond to messages (how much time depends on your job, try starting with 30 minutes and work your way up). Don’t go over your scheduled time unless you absolutely must. Without email, phone calls, and other messages distracting you, you should be able to keep more focused on more important things thereby not only completing tasks faster, but also producing better results.

Defer drop-ins. It’s easy to ignore your phone by putting it on silent; unfortunately coworkers do not come with such a handy feature. When dealing with a drop-in, first go ahead and give them your full attention even if you don’t want to. You’ve already been disrupted, so why not? Second, be polite and be helpful; you might not like being disrupted, but being polite and helpful is the best way to get what you want, even if what you want is for them to go away. It will also help build your relationship with that person, and good relationships are key to making progress as a team. Finally, defer the person’s request using one of the following tactics:

• Add their request to your task list.
• Ask them to email you the request.
• Schedule a meeting.
• Direct them to the person that can best assist them (if it’s not you).

By acknowledging the request, and writing it down you will give your coworker confidence. Before deferring them, be sure to consider that your coworkers request may be more important and urgent than what you’re doing (perhaps because it is, or perhaps because it’s your boss, or both). If that’s the case, your out of luck: Give the new task your full attention and give yourself the time you need to get it done right.

Do less. When you have too much to do then doing less is your only option. Take time, even if you think you don’t have it, to make sure you don’t drop the wrong tasks and that the tasks you complete are the most important ones.

Maximizing Response Effectiveness

So you’ve successfully started limiting the distractions of email and phone calls, and even managed to defer a coworker or two after they popped into your office unannounced. Whether you knew it or not, you’ve been building up a task backlog. That is you have to-do items on your task list and messages that you need to address, and you’ve set aside some time to address them. Now what?

Process information using the Four Ds of Decision Making. As you check email, voice-mail, etc. take one of the following four actions for each message:

• Delete it. If you’re done with the message, delete it (or file it away). That way you don’t read the same message over and over.
• Do it. If it’s a quick request, say less than 5 minutes, do it right now. If the task will take longer than that, delegate it or defer it.
• Delegate it. Should someone else be handling this task? Forward the message and let them know.
• Defer it. If you can’t take care of the request right away (5 minutes or less), add it to your task list. Just as it’s important to defer drop-ins to minimize disruption of a task, don’t let a particular email disrupt the task of getting through your email.

Execute against your task list. If you’ve followed everything to this point, you’ll have created a master task list: a single, authoritative list of everything that needs to get done. Most of your time during the day should be spent executing the tasks on this list. Before you start executing, consider spending a few minutes putting the list in priority order first (more on this in a later blog post).

Summary

Minimize disruption by responding to new requests using the Eisenhower Method. Minimize the time spent on “unimportant and urgent” tasks by keeping them in a backlog and batching them within a set time limit. Eliminate “unimportant and not urgent” tasks altogether. Use the time you gain on “important but not urgent” tasks to improve your overall efficiency. When overwhelmed, do less; but be careful to select the right tasks to drop.

As you process new tasks, use the Four Ds of Decision Making to delete, do, delegate, or defer. Deferred tasks should be tracked in a master to-do list and most of your day should be spent completing the tasks on this list.

Do you have other tips for reacting to new requests? Please share them in the comments!