the Monday Musings column from that consultant bloke

I was fairly good at time management from early in my career, I just seemed to have a natural focus that served me well, but I was into my late twenties before I encountered any sort of formal training on the subject.

That was a time when I had become a computer programmer, so all I really did was project work, and a project management course was the done thing, a tick in the box for one’s boss and the Personnel team (they weren’t calling themselves HR back then). That was when I first encountered the four box Eisenhower Matrix, a tool that the US President, and former General, had devised, although I don’t remember him getting any credit for it where I was taught about it.

You can look it up for yourselves, but the basic premise is that you categorise tasks in four boxes as Urgent & Important, Important not urgent, urgent not important and not important & not urgent. The first box you do now, the second you schedule, the third you delegate and the final box you ignore. Like most tools it works well if you use it properly, but sometimes you bend the rules a little.

The problem is that the plan you make from it, like any strategy, rarely survives the first hour, so your day can be completely screwed if you try to stick to the plan. Often you have to do what you can, and that means anything from the first, second and third groups. You may be breaking the rule, and therefore not being fully efficient in the strict sense, but if you are using your time to do something, anything, then it is time invested well.

I remember a similar where I was doing most of the speaking, but had someone else on the team to give my voice a rest, and the audience a break from me, a lady that I knew vaguely from the speaking circuit. Mid-morning I stood down at the coffee break and my colleague took the rostrum for a session on time management. I was checking my notes for my next session, and not really listening when the chairman leaned over to me and said “She’s got that arse about face”.

My substitute was using the Eisenhower Matrix, but suggesting that you started your day by getting rid of all the trivia that is neither urgent nor important so as to clear your desk for the important stuff. She called it removing distractions. From the examples that she gave she got me thinking that, whilst her logic was flawed in the model’s specific sense, it occurred to me that there might be things in that discard pile that might be used to give one of the team a chance to explore.

Sometimes there is merit in letting one of your people have free rein on a topic. It might not go anywhere, but, even if it doesn’t, they have had a chance to use the research process and have had to come up with a report and conclusion. Whatever else, they will have learned and gained experience that is of value to them, and thus to you.

To return to the point of the matrix, to get things done, first you have to do them. Use the matrix principles to prioritise your day, but it is likely that you will not be able to rattle all of your list off; people you need to speak to may not be available, information may need collating, something else might come up. It happens, so, when it does do something else, even if you are dropping down to box 2. Getting something done is better than doing nothing.