Time Management

"In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is everything." - Dwight D. Eisenhower

     As you may have noticed, there have not been posts here the past two days. As you will soon notice, today's is shorter than others. I can promise you that this will not become a pattern, but I cannot promise that it will never happen again. In other words, I plan to write a post every business day, but have certain items that jump onto my to-do list that I need to prioritize before reflection and subsequent writing.

     Part of this plays into my new favorite way of thinking about time management. While sitting in RA Training the other day I had the pleasure of attending a session on the topic led by my colleagues Dan and Alex. They presented on three different time management theories: Eisenhower's Matrix, Maslow's Hierarchy, and Analysis Paralysis. I will discuss Eisenhower's model here, as it spoke the most to me and my time management - the latter two you find out all that you would care to on a simple Google search. The basic model, attributed to US President Eisenhower and Dr. Stephen Covey (1994) takes two facets of one's tasks - urgency and importance - and places the tasks on a grid based on the relative values of those two facets. One axis is labelled importance, the other urgency. This created four quadrants: tasks high in importance and high in urgency, tasks high in importance but low in urgency, those high in urgency but low in importance, and those low in both urgency and importance. 

     Two days ago, this is how my matrix looked:

     As you can see, "Blog" fell into the bottom-left quadrant, so when it came to the time I would normally work on this post, I instead attacked the items in the top-right. As time moved-on, though, some of those top-left items shifted to the right, becoming more urgent. For example, Opening is now in only two days! Priorities can change as well making some of those less important yet urgent items more important, such as when I realized the RA Social was only two hours away and Pandora was playing some non-inclusive music. Also, classes will become much more important for me next week, but right now I am focusing on my work.

     What do you think? I had never seen this prioritization technique before, but now I am using it almost every day! I wish I could move the blog, but right now I feel that there is simply not enough room in those two top quadrants. Maybe once opening passes!

Citation: MindTools.com. (2013). "The Urgent/Important Matrix." Retrieved from: http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newHTE_91.htm .

Quote Citation: Qtd. in Nixon, R. (1962). Six crises. New York: Doubleday.

Photo By: Me